4 Tips for Growing a Remote Business with Dan Morris

Listen to Dan on The Jeff Bullas Show!

Services based businesses can sell things in bundles or tiers. So good example, back in those days of the agency, the first example I cut my teeth with was I had an incentive to sell PPC. I also had an incentive to sell SEO, but the compensation plan that I had helped inform what my bundle should be. Nobody thought of it before, but I sold them both together. And that meant that as a sales person, I made more money. So as a business owner, if you're a marketing agency owner, look at what your incentive plan is actually showing your salespeople what to do. See if you can meet your incentive plan, make it more sense, make more sense for them to start selling bundles of products together, and then let that creativity inform what they're able to put in front of a customer.

I was able to massively improve the amount of margin the agency made by bundling together two services, which meant as a salesperson, I made more so as I've gone through over the years and advised services, businesses and SaaS businesses, it's always been, how can we get people to the next level, if you're selling content? And for example, how many units of content do they need for the primary project that they've got? And what else are they goals leading them towards that we could potentially bundle into that. If you're doing a series of blogs, for example, well, would it be useful to have videos to go with this? And can you put some sorts of incentive to get those two things together? And then is there a social element to this? Well, of course there is. And thinking about what the customer is actually going to need together and then making it easy, buy a t-shirt, buy a pair of pants, buy a hat it's 29.99 - no! Buy a t-shirt, buy a pair of pants and get the hat for free - there's a whole different way of bundling it, isn't it?

You mentioned the company that was at for seven years software as a service company, it was turning over and in $250,000, and now it's turning out 1.25 million. That's right. Tell us about that story and what happened there.

Like a lot of businesses that started off in one direction and started and put money behind going in that direction and then iterated and changed things again and had a revenue spike, which then fell off and then tried something different and then tried something different and then tried several things at once. Now, this probably sounds quite familiar to a lot of people listening and, you know, it's sometimes how you get to your product market fit. You just keep iterating and changing until you get to the right thing. But they'd been at this for multiple years and they've got to a point where they just said, look, okay, we know where we want to go, but we could use some help. And ultimately they just needed to focus more.

So, you know, when we looked at all the customers that they have and the customers that were really sticking and the customers where we have the best partner in that work for them - So other technology businesses and other experts who endorsed that product, or have they had a customer in common - where was the best place for us to focus. And then they also used to get all of their leads from trade shows. So how could we improve the frequency of getting in front of that audience? And so when we reviewed, we realized that first of all, they had good people in place. They had a really good product, the process that they were using needed to be simplified. It was designed to do a lot of things, but actually it could be simplified. And I'm talking about even the stages in the CRM - what are they actually doing and does the CRM matter?

So one of the things we've noticed is if you're a marketer and a sales team is not entering information into CRM, your marketing automation is not really going to do much good because you can't start using all the advanced features of the tool. And then in this case, they use HubSpot. So you've got brilliant lifecycle stages. You've got the opportunity of passing leads over that come in from inbound. Are they MQL? Are they not? So we've refined the MQL. We got that to be really clear. We retrained and the process began to develop momentum. And so they've improved average order value. Their close rates have been really good throughout the year.

COVID actually helped them. And the reason why was because they were able to do more events with their partners in a short period of time, pivoting the value proposition of that product to help fare and the customer deliver more value during COVID. And so they had this enormous bump in the middle, which then calmed down significantly, and now we're picking up the volume again. And it's been a really interesting year because that bump taught us a lot and we were able to refine a whole lot of information with them about who their ideal customer really is. And now as we go into 2021 more confident than ever about building the team up and building out the right partners to get them to the right size deals that are going to give them even more confidence. And meanwhile, they 5 X their revenue. And so that's been a really fun way of making sure we have the foundations in place. COVID didn't rock the boat. It allowed us to handle a lot of stuff effectively. And definitely they had a fun year.

You mentioned the term MQL. Some people may not know what that acronym means. Can you explain what an MQL is?

Absolutely. A marketing qualified lead is the point of a lot of arguments between sales and marketing people. It is the definition of a lead that also meets other criteria such as the right size of business or the right job title of a person within the target business. And if it meets a couple of those different criteria, and in this case, it's the right number of salespeople on the team, the right industry that they're in, then it can be passed across to a sales person to work. And so rather than just working every lead that comes through, you can apply priority to those that meet other criteria that ultimately it helps improve the close rate from meeting to deal.

Interesting tension. Isn't it between marketing and sales - sales go to marketing, not producing enough leads. And marketing says, well, we're sending lots of leads. Then the sales team says, well, they don't convert because they haven't been qualified well enough. Or I think this is a common problem. Can you tell us a little bit about how you solve that problem for us?

Yeah. So once we understand, once we've done the review process, we can then share the information. So imagine a spreadsheet where the finance team has told you that your best customers listed A to Z down the side, spent this much money last year. And then marketing can tell you the name of the person at that company that is in the database and maybe their job title, but what you really want in order to be able to create an addressable market is more.

So let's use a SaaS company as an example, they're going to want to know what other technologies that company uses that they want to sell to. They're going to want to know that revenue, their location, whatever else is relevant to that business, that's where you really start getting into the details. And so if you can then agree that people who match those criteria are going to be the best place for sales to spend their time, then you can also agree that marketing can invest their budget to go and get more people that look like them. And so if you start using, rather than just get me a number of leads, which could be people filling in their name on a lead form and nothing else, but instead focus on how many MQL is do we need in order to create the right amount of pipeline, you then get the sort of alignment between sales and marketing that keeps them better focused.

There's always discussion, always discussion, but people are more aligned about, okay, well, if we do get 150 MQLs, then we're expecting to close X number of deals out the back of it. Our average sales cycle is this number of days. And you can actually start creating a much more stress relief model. So you can really begin to predict what's going to come out of the pipeline at the other end, rather than just knowing that everybody's busy, as we all know, it's easy to be busy.

So let's talk a little bit about the role of content based marketing to help provide good qualified leads for sales. And so let's go into that.

So content on its own can do a lot, people are researching have ever since back in those days of 2007, 2008, when people started blogging and creating content and, you know, beginning to invest in regular content on their website, you know, I was in a very, very happy place of working with an agency that was at the early stages of that content marketing way. We served a lot of companies that just needed content for their website to be relevant. And we grew when we grew and we grew and ended up hiring hundreds of writers because it was such a huge surge and it's always it's continued ever since.

And so what we've got now is every real brand out there has got to develop their own content. They've got to understand where people are at in terms of, are we attracting people? Are we getting them to consider our offering or are we actually at the decision stage where they need different types of information? And I'm sure your audience is very familiar with you know, the concept marketing, the marketing funnel - very important to recognize that different bits of content I created for different reasons.

And so from a growth perspective, looking at marketing and sales is really important to give each one of those bits of content, a score. And so if you're using an advanced marketing tool like HubSpot and the HubSpot CRM, for example, or the solutions are available, you know, you can actually give us score to people visiting web pages that meet within a certain category of topics. You can give a score to certain things being downloaded. So you might give one point for somebody visiting a certain web page. You might give 10 points for somebody downloading a piece of content. You might give 15 points for somebody attending a webinar that you've organized with a partner. You might give a higher score for somebody filling out a form. And let's say your theoretical point score that you want people to be at is 50. And you've captured their email all the way at the top. They get to 50 points. And then that is one thing that says, hello, I'm raising my hand. I have high intent. And so at that point, there's a really, really good history of what content has done to build up a score in order to tell the sales and marketing team, Hey, I've got high intent. I'd be looking around these specific pages.

And once you start recording that data and working with it, you can then refine it month on month, quarter on quarter and refine your lead scoring so that you can agree that that lead score driven factor can be the thing that creates that is the difference between a lead and a marketing qualified lead. And that's where the collaboration with sales and marketing really can be great because if they're looking at, Hey, Jeff's been seeing all these different pages on the site, he's downloaded this bit a concept. And now I'm talking to him, this is great. He's already informed, but may ask more questions about the topics he was interested in to see if he's got everything he needs. And that just helps to tie the whole thing together and helps prioritize the next bits of content that you might want as well.

So awareness is the top of the funnel, right? So you want to try and attract as many subscribers as possible by covering larger topics. You know, talking about what's going on in the industry top 10, top five, those sorts of things. Now, when we're looking at it, that is it's a relatively low score because it's just a very early stage bit of content that's there. And so, you know, the marketing team would be running targeted campaigns for people who visited the website, retargeting them to get them to download a piece of content or to engage in some more of the web content. You'd have your social media team working on driving people back to those web pages, those sorts of things. And then in the consideration stage really it's helping people into that experience.

So something that has been quite common in e-commerce is, you know, if you join an e-commerce mailing list, you quite often get a welcome email and something that will hit you there is a welcome email with an offer, or if you do that in the B2B space and you give people a couple of welcome emails that tell them a bit more about what you do and a bit more, the kind of people that you've helped, you can actually start adding up a whole lot of extra experience for that person. Who's just downloadable content. So, you know, that could be one specific campaign that you could do. There's three or four emails long that actually really increases the lead score of that one better content rather than just going, okay, well, they fill the form in, let's leave it alone for a bit that two or three, four emails in a welcome email can be really powerful to get people onto your page. And so that's helps to get them into actually, I liked the way that these guys think about this problem that I'm having and you know, what more can I learn?

And so you'd be the opportunity then to push them to other bits of content that have the next step on the path, right? So that might be a how to - if you've got a piece of software and you need to work out how to implement this thing, or even the timeline, if you think about a company and they're evolving from a spreadsheet to a CRM, to a CRM with email capabilities, to a CRM with marketing automation, there's going to be different things that they face along the way, right? And if you're a software provider that needs to educate people about where they are now and where you fit, that's a really good time to be giving them those bits of content. So there's comparisons, there's typically people also have these softwares at this stage, all sorts of stuff in the middle there. And then they might watch a short demo on one of your pages. At which point they might ask, you want to talk to one of your salespeople. And then they ended up in a conversion, a decision place, right? So you've got awareness. You've got consideration. Should I be talking to this vendor? Should I not? And then you've got decision at which point you can share with them case studies, you can share with them testimonials, you can share with them ROI calculators, all of those sorts of things at that stage that can really help them get to that next level where they're ready to say, okay, I've done all the math. I've considered all the variables. Now I'll have that. One-To-One demo with your sales person and all being well, they become a customer and you put them into the advocacy world where, Hey, if we can help you be really successful, can we work together on a case study? Will you speak with us at this virtual event that we're doing with our partner, that you all work with? And you know, really working with that person all the way through their journey is marketing to sales, to customer success. And you've probably got the partner team involved in that as well, because there are the technologypartners involved, and then you can leverage their networks because you're both working with this customer now. And isn't that a great case study to show when X software works with Y software, this customer is like you and they're happy. So that's how we think about it. It's it definitely doesn't end when the sale is completed. There's lots of variables on the way down that funnel, of course, but that's a pretty solid way of looking at it.

So that the sorts of stuff that we're thinking about is content, is campaigns, is eBooks and white papers. It is you're going to go to an event or a trade show in your promoting that across your different channels. Maybe you're doing a press release about a customer that you won, or a problem that you solved. You're out there in your social media, or you're taking part in webinars. Those sorts of things. They're all top of funnel. People who've never heard of you before, but they might bump into you when they're looking to try and solve that problem, or they're trying to search around it in. So there's sorts of things are how to use, how to avoid causing this problem, how to solve this problem, how to successfully implement these sorts of tools, best practices for rolling out these sorts of things. They're great bits of content for that awareness stage or the sort of the, what you need to know about types of content. So you think about it in that way as the how to, or the best practices or the how. And you can share that in those sorts of eBooks and white papers for downloads. So that those initial form fillers, that came to an event or a trade show and being seen on stage or you're bumping into people well virtually these days. But you know, you go and you provide a virtual booth and there's a reason for people to download the piece of content that you've got available. Those sorts of things, the top of the funnel next up would be the consideration. So building a long-term strategy with a platform like this, right? So the easiest way to switch to these types of things, the most cost effective way to migrate from spreadsheet to CRM, for example, the most effective way to onboard team members, to these types of platforms, If you're buying a new, innovative technology, those are the sorts of things that we see working really well in that sort of consideration interest stage. And then when you get to the decision stage, of course, this is a hot lead for the sales team, right? You've got people who are contacting you, they've signed up, they want to see a demo. They want to see a proof of concept. They want to see a proposal or a case study or something like that. And so the content you really going to need, there are just sales basics, the consistent sales deck that you can use, and you can evolve. It's a one page summary. And if somebody says, send me your one pager, you have to have that ready to go. And a lot of smaller businesses don't really think about that. And they're like, I don't have it available a template. So if you've got a software or a process that actually you're going to walk people through, why would you not have a template for that? So a project plan template, we are here, we're going to go along this path together. And we're going to get there brilliant, to be able to pull up a visual.

Would that be a framework in itself?

A template or a framework to be able to walk people through very much like where you have the review refine rollout replace, we can sort with people and say, here's where we are. Here's where we're going to start. Here's the things that we're going to look out together. Here's the information that we're going to need in order to be able to look at that here's the collaboration that we'll do and so on. And so if you're creating content to try and fill that part of your funnel, then creating a framework or a template like that can work really well. Lots more examples like that. So, you know, costs, revenue, modeling exercises, ROI, calculators, those sorts of things. And then in the advocacy, once you've got somebody up and running and you've done some consultation with them after they started to see results, then you can start interviewing them. You can start breaking down the results into case studies with visually, you can start getting them to speak with you events. You can start getting them to contribute, to written content that you're doing those sorts of things.

So are there any simple CRMs out there for people to cut their teeth on before they dive into maybe a HubSpot that you think are great in terms of taking people from the consideration through to sales?

So my recommendation is keep it simple and keep it cheap until you're ready to really invest, make sure that you've documented it, use something like Lucid Chart to be able to show the flow of your sales process, then decide what technology you need. I would always say, don't go in and buy something heavy and expensive that you can't possibly commit the hours to use until you're ready to do that. Because like you say, people use three, four, 5% of these platforms, and if they're spending hundreds or even thousands a month on them, it's going to burn. If they're ready for it, then they'll get great return on investment from it. So I would say, keep it simple. It's HubSpot CRM is a great CRM. Just start off with, if you just started on your content marketing journey, there are so many different ways of doing email followups, lots of different email platforms out there that people can use. They don't necessarily have to be from the same brand to start off, but it's when you're getting to the point where you're going to add one or two salespeople and full-time marketers into your team that they're going to want to have a real strong input into what the technology they want to use is. And that's the point where you're going to get your checkbook out and really look at the investment. So, you know, to get you from zero to your first 10 clients, it shouldn't be a concern. You can use a spreadsheet. To get you from 10 to a hundred. You might start investing in something light, and then to go beyond that, you're going to be building a team of people who are going to have an input into that and the simpler, the better to get you off the ground.

So what are some of your observations of remote work and the challenges and the opportunities that you see with remote work and companies that are done well in this time and those that are struggling?

So first of all, remote work has been accelerating for a much longer time than COVID has caused it. I worked with a couple of different businesses over the last few years that are looking at flexible office space and making it easier for companies to access multiple offices all over the place. And obviously you've got the WeWorks of the world who've developed a very popular brand of being able to do that, but there are software businesses that are making it easy for much larger businesses to buy units of working time in lots of different locations for the distributed teams. Because the HR teams have been recognizing for some time that people want that quality of life, as well as being able to commit their time to work, but they might want to have a dedicated workspace wherever they are.

And so, you know, this has been happening for a long time, the large corporate monolith headquarters, at least it seems to us to be less popular than they were. And instead it's the access to global talent. It's the access to people who are comfortable, focused and relaxed and able to add value to projects. And this last year obviously has put a real magnifying glass on that and the businesses that had already invested in things like a really solid CRM, a really solid project management tool. And in the world of sales, there are a couple of tools which record and transcribe calls and, you know, from a coaching perspective, which is a lot of the work that we do, working with teams that are trying to get better, working with teams that are trying to grow - these sorts of software platforms for coaching and breaking down calls and giving feedback and those sorts of things are really valuable because it saves you from having to be there at the same time. They all ride along and instead somebody can send you a snippet and say, Hey, I think I messed up here. Can you give me some guidance? Or how can I do this better? And so that the teams that are really going to thrive going forward are the ones that adopt that mindset. How can we support our workers wherever they are? Because if they come back to the office, they're still going to be wearing a headset. They're still going to be talking to people on zoom and they're going to be doing business internationally a lot of the time. And that percentage is skewing all the time. As people get more and more comfortable with it.

And so those that have already decided, okay, look, whether we go back to the office or not, we can help our teams be successful, they can invest in those sorts of tools. So again, transparency of work, and I'm a big fan of the way that technology's built in an agile environment when they have daily stand-ups and they tell each other what's going on and they get stuck on stuck and unblocked. Why not bring that to your sales and marketing team? We do. Yeah. We get marketing projects unstuck. We get salespeople to collaborate with marketing projects because, Hey, can you give me a hand with this? Or what can I do this webinar? Let's have a sidebar. That happens and you're managing it on a project management tool in a way that you would never have that sort of collaboration before. It was always, there was a wall - sales and marketing. And so the best teams are the ones that recognize that people are involved in many more things at the same time today, you look at Gen Z and look at how many jobs each one of them has got. You know, they're a content producer around the marketer and the sales person and the model and under this, under that, all at the same time. Millennials are doing more and more of that as well. Everyone's got a side hustle, you know, so that those sorts of multi-tasking and things that are going on, everyone's got developing and using more skills than ever before. And so, you know, the businesses that recognize that and give people the tools to make it easy, I think are going to be the ones that are really going to be successful going forward and vice versa.

What are some of the top tools you've seen for remote work?

The two most common ones that we use? There's one that's called Chorus, which will just work alongside Zoom. And it will be almost taking notes for you while you're doing a zoom call. It'll be transcribing it. And afterwards you can review it. You can send snippets to people. You can work with your manager on getting coaching and another platform that does very much the same thing. That's called Jiminny out of the UK. They're great guys. And it's another layer that works alongside whether you're using Google meets or zoom to provide that coaching function to automatically make it easy to recognize when some, one person's talking or the other person's talking visually.

So one of the things that we do is when we are looking to replace ourselves, we'll make sure that the process is documented and we'll make sure that there are examples of everything that takes place along the sales process. And these tools are great ways of doing that. So here's a great way of doing a discovery call in this business. Here's a great way of doing a case study call in this business. Here's a great way of doing and negotiation for this type of deal. If you can just use the snippet from that and put that into your training manual, everybody's then got a good example, audio-visually with a transcript of what works. So they make it much easier to use those sorts of current captured in the moment, natural flow videos, rather than a stuffy training video, which doesn't really relate to the moment so that great for those sorts of things. But also teams can share things with each other, Hey, I'm stuck here, can you help me with this? And they Slack it to each other and within a few seconds, somebody could be listening to it and then just say, yeah, actually try this.

How can we try and how can we document, how can we track best practice and do a synchronous communication instead of having to show up to a meeting, do it. We can actually record once, share many times.

It's interesting. I definitely needed to do that because I initially always liked to show up to meetings and be a hundred percent present. And so if I find that if I'm typing and I'm not listening at the same time, so a few years ago I invested in something that looks like a huge

microphone, sort of almost like a tricorder of star Trek if you ever seen one of those. And we used to plunk it in the middle of the table, and I just say, look, I'm going to record everything here, just so that I can give everything my full attention, and then we can go back and we can transcribe it later on. And then that evolved to be able to upload those files to something like rev.com, which can then quickly transcribe either using AI or humans. And now you've got apps. If you wanted to record that in-person meeting over coffee, you've got apps like Otter, which you can install on your smartphone and just press a button, put it on the table, and Otter be listening away and making notes for you as you actually sit out in the open. And you know, so that is everywhere we are. Now, there are opportunities to harness technology to make things easier. And, you know, as you're on the train on the way back, or when you get back to the apartment or office, you can then just send a snippet with some notes in it, from a meeting that has automatically been transcribed for you. And, you know, those sorts of bits of enablement are just going to accelerate. And it's so exciting to be able to do that and to share knowledge in such an easy way. But of course, first you've got to develop knowledge. You've got to organize it in a way that makes sense. And then you can actually share it with people. And that's really where we brought the biggest value add is helping people stack those blocks in the right order and then record those bits and then roll it out and show people how to use it, coach them as they're getting used to it. And then it, the thing begins to evolve really quickly. And technology has just enabled that all the way through and, you know, for businesses that operate using legacy systems and they're slower to adopt these sorts of tools, we're genuinely seeing a lot of market opportunity missed by them not investing and being able to share that knowledge with people who might have joined their team, but see an easier opportunity with somewhere that's already got their knowledge base nailed, and they can easily onboard remotely because, Hey, who knows when they can go back to the office for a training session?