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How do you measure the return on training investment?

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on December 13, 2011 10:08 AM | | Comments (0)

Like many people at this time of year, I'm in 'reflection mode', reviewing the many decisions made this year and grouping them into 'very good ones', 'not so good ones' and 'really bad ones' so that I can learn from mistakes and build plans for next year.

On the topic of learning, one area that I have been looking at is training. Like the marketing budget, the training budget is often thought of as a discretionary spend that can easily be cut when the going gets tough. Thought best practice encourages businesses to continue to invest in training & development during hard times so that skills are in place when things improve; in practice, this can be hard to justify when revenues and profits are going south.

So how do you assess the return on learning?
Assessing the return on a training course isn't that difficult. After each training course, attendees are given a feedback form which will invariably assess the trainer, the pace, the quality of the materials and so on. This feedback will help trainers and managers understand how much attendees think they will use what they've learnt in the workplace. However, as anyone who has ever been on a training course will know, just because attendees had a great time, loved the trainer and thought the materials were first class, does not mean that it will impact their work performance at all!

To get to the true ROI of training, you need to be able to evaluate the learning that takes place and how much has been applied on the job, something which obviously can't be assessed until weeks or months after the training has finished. This is a much more difficult task, but is really important. 

Knowledge Pool  ran a survey across many different training courses in ten different types of organisations: central government, customer service, engineering, local government, IT Services, manufacturing and media. They received over 1,000 responses and found that 70% of training course attendees do apply their learning to the workplace.

This is encouraging. They also found that if you're a manager, you have a key role to play as 53% of the learners in the survey got line manager support to help apply their learning. The importance of line manager support in the transfer of knowledge to the workplace was also supported by research by the Marketing Leadership Council  who found that manager support is one of three critical priorities for driving learning application. 

Moreover, the Marketing Leadership Council also found that employees of managers who are very effective at development outperform their peers by up to 25% (source: Learning & Development Roundtable). With this in mind, it's no coincidence that the areas that are likely to see an increase in training demand in 2012 are Leadership development and New Manager training.

What are the benefits of training & development
The Marketing Leadership Council  also found that where learning is applied, training results in three main benefits:
-   more engaged and committed employees who perform at a higher level
-   employees who are more likely to stay with the organization, building the knowledge
    pool and reducing the cost of recruiting new staff
-   more confident employees who are able to do their jobs faster and more easily

Encourage sharing will increase the ROI further
One final point to bear in mind when it comes to increasing the return on a training investment, is to encourage those who have benefited from structured training to share their new ideas, tools and techniques with their colleagues. There are many ways to do this from workshops to webcasts, blogs and forums. In today's digital world, sharing is far easier and quicker than ever before.

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B2B Marketing

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on November 28, 2011 2:58 PM | | Comments (0)
 I saw this useful summary of what matters most to b2b marketeers today.

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Continue reading B2B Marketing.

Linking Marketing Automation with CRM: 5 steps to success

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on November 1, 2011 2:20 PM | | Comments (0)

I spoke this morning at The Funnel Conference outlining RBI's experience of implementing marketing automation to support our new business process.

In case you missed it, the five steps for success were:

Have a vision - in other words know where you're going so you realise when you have arrived. Often we set off in a direction without any clear view of the destination which obviously doesn't get us anywhere.

Map your stakeholders carefully - whilst technology is the great enabler, real change comes from people and there are a number of stakeholder groups to consider: marketing, sales and technologists are the obvious ones, but don't forget those influencers such as sales operations who have the ear of sales!  Marketing automation will impact them and you want them to be advocates.

Speak the same language, in other words define a lead carefully so that you can measure, benchmark and report funnel progress, and focus attention on where improvement is required.

Get your head around lead scoring - this is the functionality that moves marketing automation on from being a tool that can send personalised emails to a tool that can automate the rules around lead qualification. Once you master and embed this functionality, your sales people will be able focus their efforts on the prospects with the propensity to become customers. ICIS, one of RBI's key brands servicing the global chemicals, energy and fertiliser markets have achieved a 16% conversion from lead to sale, thanks to their online nurturing programmes.

Create robust processes and governance to support important tasks such as data acquisition and content creation.

I'll share a link to my slides in due course.

 

7 Deadly Sins Of Marketing

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on October 18, 2011 12:22 PM | | Comments (0)

 

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9 Must-Haves for the Perfect Landing Page

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on October 17, 2011 2:56 PM | | Comments (0)
Here's a useful checklist to make sure that your landing pages both engage and convert your visitors. There's a free whitepaper to download too.

http://blog.hubspot.com/blog/tabid/6307/bid/26866/9-must-haves-for-the-perfect-landing-page.aspx/?source=blogtwitter

Rebranding - how to start and finish

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on October 10, 2011 9:26 AM | | Comments (0)

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Today, i want to cover the important topic of branding. It's a strategic topic, but get it right and your brand's reputation will make your marketing efforts much easier and your ROI look far more attractive. There's a lot of confusion about what a brand really is, so to start let's be clear on what it isn't. A brand is not a logo, a catchy slogan or a nice design. These visual elements are important aspects of a brand's identity, but a true brand goes far deeper than these things and can be enhanced or destroyed by every single touchpoint that your brand has with the marketplace. That includes the approach your front-line sales and customer service people take; what you customers chose to say about you in social media forums as well as your advertising messaging.

Having a strong brand reputation is important to any size business and in this post, I wanted to share some of the steps we went through when we recently rebranded the hospitality publishing business, Caterer and Hotelkeeper .

The objective of the change was simply to make it far easier for our customers (and ourselves) to understand what Caterer and Hotelkeeper can do for its customers in today's multimedia world, and differentiate the brand from the competition. In total we went through the following 6 steps:

1. Diagnose the problem - speaking to our customers through market research as well as on a day-to-day basis had made it quite clear that both user and advertiser customers still perceived Caterer and Hotelkeeper as a magazine, a single channel providing content to the hospitality community. This was despite the fact that the website associated with the magazine had built an online audience of more than 250k visits per month; that the email social media programmes also reached thousands of people each week. The branding of the group didn't help. The magazine was called Caterer and Hotelkeeper, but the website was called Caterersearch and the whole group was called Caterer Group.

2. Work out where you want to go. To do this, we used external expertise to help us solve our problem. We worked with a branding consultant called Keith Lucas who was able to challenge us on what our current brand perception was and helped us visualize what we'd like it to be in the future.

3. Decision. The next big step was to make a decision on the name and get input from the team. We had a bit of a debate and in the end we all agreed that Caterer and Hotelkeeper should be elevated to group status, replacing The Caterer Group. In addition, CatererSearch didn't help the customer understand the enormous reach of the brand today, so should be rebranded 'CatererandHotelkeeper.com. We also agreed that the sub brands should be part of this overall brand structure, so now we have Caterer and Hotelkeeper jobs, Caterer and Hotelkeeper Directory, Caterer and Hotelkeeper Events as well as the Caterer and Hotelkeeper magazine.

4. Design. We already had a logo and didn't want to change that. What we wanted though was to differentiate it with an icon that told a story, a story of a big, sociable marketplace focused on people and conversations. A brief was pulled together and sent to our agency.

That then resulted in some internal debates as we inspected various choices and in the end we all agreed on one icon.

5. Guidelines. The devil is in the detail and any brand needs to be reinforced by consistent communication across touchpoints. People like consistency, but achieving this in a business with multiple touchpoints and many staff is a challenge. A set of guidelines was produced and circulated and the whole story was communicated internally to make sure that everyone understood the rationale for the change and, most importantly, could explain it in their own words to their contacts.

6. Live date & implementation. The final step was agreeing a day that we wanted to make the changes. September the 29th was chosen and then all of the work went into changing the website, writing about the story, creating ads, creating email signatures, changing voicemail messages...a lot of effort.

We are now Caterer and Hotelkeeper, a multimedia business. Of course, this is only the start as a rebrand doesn't mean that customers will understand the changed positioning from day 1, it takes a lot more effort and consistent communication to achieve that.


Online Measurement and Strategy

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on July 19, 2011 9:56 AM | | Comments (0)
Online measurement and strategy is such a big focus for many companies and this trend is just going to increase as time goes by. I was interested to read Econsultancy's latest research on this topic  in association with Lynchpin.  The survey of 800 respondents took place in March and April this year and included a good split between in-house organisations (both b2b and b2c) and supply-side respondents such as agencies, vendors and consultants.

Some of the insights include:

A growing reliance on Google Analytics (GA), 44% of respondents now use GA exclusively for web analytics.
More companies are analysing data which sheds light on the interaction between online and offline.
38% of companies are planning to increase web analytics technology spend over the next year.
The proportion of companies who analyse reputation, buzz and social media metrics has increased significantly (+10%). Most companies are interested in listening to the voice of the customer and in measuring and benchmarking social media activity.
Lack of budget and resources remains the most significant barrier preventing companies from having an effective online measurement strategy.

Further information

To read a synopsis of the report. 

Customer-centric upselling

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on July 19, 2011 9:42 AM | | Comments (0)
Upselling and cross-selling are important contributors to business success, but it's important to get the balance right between offering additional value that will really help the customer and trying to sell them something they clearly don't want. I was reminded of this the other day after putting petrol in my car at a BP garage. The pleasant chap at the counter asked me whether I would like any danish pastries, pointing to the large pile on the counter. 'No thanks' I replied. He clearly was on some incentive plan to sell as many as he could, as he kept asking me the same question. In fact he asked me 6 times, by which point I was just a bit irritated....I don't even like danish pastries!

I read a short story on CatererSearch that shows how getting the approach right and being truly customer-focused leads to longer-term business benefits.

'I remember reading Nico Ladenis' book many years ago where he wrote about a lovely incident which sums up the difference between up selling and good hospitality - it was about a wintery cold night when a popular national food critic walked into his restaurant (unrecognised obviously). She asked the sommelier for a good wine suggestion, expecting him to 'up sell' the most expensive wine but to her surprise, he suggested one of the cheapest wines on the menu which he recommended would go well on the cold wintery night with her food. She left more than impressed by the modest and honest hospitality she received and in return, she wrote a glorious review in the national paper, earning the restaurant well deserved fame and lot of business.

This small story has stayed with me for many many years now and sums up my beliefs on this subject - 'right selling' for long term returns rather than pushy, untactful or bland up selling for short term gain.'

Optimizing the purchase funnel

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on July 11, 2011 11:36 AM | | Comments (0)
Much has been written about the purchase funnel,with many models appearing over the years. In simple terms, if you're goal is to promote and sell a product of some sort, it's going to be very useful understanding the stages a potential customer goes through on their decision-journey. With this knowledge, you can tailor your brand messages to be more personalized and more relevant. To do this well in the digital world, you are reliant on data from web analytics tools, surveys, social media platforms, ecommerce platforms, customer service and other sources.

I was interested to see the post from marketing-made-simple , which summarizes some of the different models of purchase funnel optimization that have been created.  A few of the key points made include:

1. The shape, number of stages and duration of the purchase will vary depending on the consumer and the nature of the product. What's important to identify the key stages in your funnel and work out how to maximise the chances of a progress to sale.

2. The purchase funnel focuses on the decision-making process of a typical buyer. This is different to the sales funnel which dictates the typical process a salesman can take to close a deal.

3. Whilst different models use different labelling, the stages will all be the same, moving from pre-awareness, to awareness, research, consideration, decision, action and then re-purchase.

4. The traditional purchase funnel may be too linear and a variety of complex factors are at work, with social media at the centre. In other words, you shouldn't think that purchase decisions are simple and that people are influenced by many different factors such as customer reviews.

5. The McKinsey model highlights the importance of understanding the trigger, appreciating that your brand is just one in the consideration (short list) and the importance of paying attention to all customer touch points.

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Buyersphere 2011: would the real Customer 2.0 please stand up?

By
Lawrence Mitchell
on July 8, 2011 2:44 PM | | Comments (0)

Base One recently published the results of their Buyersphere report, asking 1k business buyers about the actions they took when making a purchase. It provides some useful insights to help b2b marketers evolve their practices to ensure their brands are promoted in the places that customers are looking today. A few of the highlights include:

1. Buyers are using an even greater variety of channels to form an opinion about a brand. 

2. Digital channels are playing an increasingly important role

3. More and more buyers are attending webinars

4. Buyers are becoming more cautious about sharing their data  

You can read the full article and download the Buyersphere report for free on the IDM blog.

If you need help to communicate your brand messages in an increasingly fragmented media world, then don't feel you have to do it all alone. Publishers and agencies can create content assets for you and then promote these across multiple channels, helping you focus on understanding your own customers and optimize your own funnel. 

References:

Reed business information offers creative media solutions to help reach and influence the following business buyers: farmers, hospitality operators, hairdressers, aviation workers, commercial property agents and opticians. Find out more.

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