Productivity

5 Signs You Should Invest in a Business Marketing Mentor

09/23/2017 by Linsay Duncan

As a marketer, being challenged by your job – whether through a step up the career ladder, taking on management responsibilities or tackling a new project – is a good thing. Right? Yes, it’s change and challenge that grow us as professionals. And life would be incredibly dull if the landscape stood still.

How we handle pressure like this can directly impact how we progress professionally.

Coping with challenging situations isn’t always about being the hero. Coping is also about knowing when to ask for help. If you’re a marketer and find yourself stuck in one of these situations, it may be time to call in reinforcements.

The big promotion

You’ve made that step up you’ve been dreaming of. That senior marketing position is now yours. Congrats! But now, how to manage all that added responsibility, extra pressure from above, and new challenges it brings? You’ve also got to manage the transition from your previous job while trying to make an impression in your new role. Gulp.

This can lead to even more hair-pulling if you don’t happen to have an experienced marketer around to lean on. Someone who’s been in your shoes. At crucial times like these where you need to step up, and fast, it might be time to learn from a marketing mentor. They can pass on their experience, and impart valuable knowledge whilst up-skilling you. Quality mentoring can seriously help you fast forward progress.

First time steering the helm

Exciting, motivating, interesting, challenging, worrying, terrifying – all sentiments likely to hit the first time you’re handed the reins in a senior marketing position. When people turn to you for guidance and strategy for the first time, it can be overwhelming. Where do you start? How do you pull a marketing strategy together? What direction should it take? And what sets a good strategy apart from a bad one?

Of course, there’s lots of helpful advice online – ‘how to’ guides, strategy templates etc. Well worth exploring. However, when time is tight or online resources only take you so far, that’s is where calling in an outside professional can be a smart move. A business marketing mentor experienced in shaping and delivering strategies, who’s done this before, can give just the steer and practical advice you need to set you on the right path. Saving you time and taking away that fear of the unknown.

The time-poor leader

Why oh why isn’t human cloning a thing yet? Frustrating when work is so manic that you feel you need two of yourself or another 24 hours in each day. During periods when it seems time constantly slips through your fingers, and there’s only more of the same ahead, stop for a moment. If lack of time is noticeably impacting performance the sensible thing may be to ask for help.

Pulling in an extra set of hands to share the workload or hand over a project to, can bring immediate relief. Not to mention help you win back previous time. A marketing mentor worth their weight in gold can help you wade through your workload, boost performance, and help you shine.

People management

Taking on responsibility for a larger group of people, particularly for marketers new to people management, can be incredibly daunting. After all, it’s people’s careers and professional development you’re influencing here! While some people thrive on it, people management skills are not innate in everyone.

Similarly, when leading an inexperienced team or people who need up-skilling in areas you’re not an expert in, how do you know if you’re capable of addressing their needs? Acknowledging gaps in your own leadership expertise is a strength, not a weakness. Now you know exactly where you need help and can seek out help.

There are people gifted in this area who can offer invaluable advice and knowledge, to help you become the people leader you’ve always strived to be. What’s more you’ll find there are marketing trainers with ready-made courses designed to bring the people manager out in you.

The unknown

With successful growing business, one thing you can be sure of is that change lies ahead. From focusing on new markets, entering new territories, expanding product ranges to mergers and acquisitions, marketing will need to adapt and respond. When faced with new demands, where do you turn?

If your CEO is asking new and challenging things of you, and there’s no time to re-train or go on a course to upskill yourself, consider bringing in an expert. A good business marketing mentor will be able to walk you through the steps to get you where you need to be. They’ll give practical advice but can also feed into the actual project or strategy you’re working on. Having someone show you the ropes once, can payback tenfold. Good professional support can leave you with skills and capabilities that stay with you throughout your career.

Accelerate performance

What all of this boils down to is recognising when it makes sense to accelerate performance through outside help. Whether for your performance or that of your team, or of the marketing you deliver. Struggling on whilst things slip and stress mounts is neither sustainable nor good for your sanity. With a quality business marketing mentor at your side before you know it those hurdles will be far behind.

How a marketing mentor can boost your performance (and your career)

08/20/2017 by Linsay Duncan

I count myself one of the lucky ones. Over the 18 years I’ve worked in marketing, I’ve been lead and mentored by some incredible business leaders and one outstanding marketing mentor in particular. Their influence is still evident in how I deal with people, how I strategise and approach problems, and in the work I deliver now. Thank the lucky stars for those people (you know who you are).

Recently, off the back of a surge of pleas for marketing mentoring, I realise there’s a real need out there for good B2B marketing mentors. But there’s a lack of understanding as to:

when they might come in useful,
how they can support you and
the ways in which can benefit both a business and its marketers.

Read on for a few pointers on when a quality mentor could make a big difference to the performance of your marketing function and to the professional growth of senior marketing professionals.

When to consider a marketing mentor

Looking back there’s a few points over my professional career where outside mentoring would’ve helped me through a tough project. Or a time where my capabilities were being stretched by new demands from a business. When I add those scenarios to those of my clients, typically there are five situations where a business marketing mentor’s services can prove valuable:

Lone ranger – where a marketing individual or small team is fighting marketing’s corner in a business full of non-marketers (i.e. there’s limited senior marketing experience to support them and help them grow).
Off the back of a nice meaty promotion – promotions can call for new skills, dealing with more senior stakeholders, greater responsibility and accountability, and more plates to spin.
A growing team to nurture – taking on a new or larger team, particularly for a first-time manager, presents a whole host of new challenges to marketing leaders.
A change in business direction – examples ranging from entering new territories and building new products or services, to merging or acquiring and internal structural changes, bring challenging new demands on marketing.
A whacking great project to take on – new projects can prove taxing for many reasons and is often where outside expertise can ease the pressure.

Act like a soldier – bring in the cavalry to fast forward progress

It can be a smart move to pull in the cavalry. When weighing up your team’s or your own coaching needs it’s quite possible that you can get there yourself. But finding the time to study and read up on the subject matter, set out a training programme and checkpoints (and everything else that’s needed for successful mentoring) takes time. Mentoring also requires a skillset and approach that’s not inherent within every manager or leader.

The right mentor on-board and you can be fast-forwarding progress and saving significant time.

What results should I expect? I want ROI!

First, map out the areas you want to address (e.g. potential skills gaps, tasks/hurdles which seem unmanageable…). Next discuss these with your mentor-to-be. Their role will be to set out suitable milestones and KPIs (key performance indicators such as putting learnings into practice, tests or run-throughs to see what’s been learnt) and regular review points. These reviews are when results will come to the surface and you can assess success.

Consider whether it’s feasible to factor in measurements or goals which relate to the mentoring subject matter. For example, add them into Personal Development Programmes, for added incentivisation and visibility. Gathering feedback from relevant stakeholders can also be a valuable checkpoint to see whether progress is evident.

Learning from an experienced professional is good for your career

A marketing mentor’s job is to make you look good – to arm you with new skills, approaches, mindsets, tools… helping you towards your next professional milestone is what motivates them. Your growth is their success. This should be a serious consideration if you’re keen to climb the career ladder and reach new heights.

For more tips on getting in professional support check out The Guardian’s article, “How to find a professional mentor“. And here’s what not to do from Fast Company, “8 Successful People Share How Not To Find A Mentor“. You can find out more about Your Allies’s mentoring and coaching services here.

You’ve upgraded your marketing – now what?

07/19/2017 by Linsay Duncan

Your Allies guest blog from Jonathan Peachey, Metis

If you’re in the enviable position of already having marketing up and running, the leads starting to flow in, turning into new clients – then you may now be facing the challenge of how to deliver more work. How do you manage that growth? What processes do you need to take you from leads through to the delivery stage? Our colleagues at Metis have a few sound ideas about how to tackle this. Read on…

How’s your working life going? Are you finding that either you’re flat out delivering work or you’re desperately looking for more to do? We’ve seen feast and famine in many businesses. Getting the balance right is really tough. It’s because businesses don’t have enough information.

Under-8s soccer

Blaming feast and famine on lack of information seems a bit of a stretch. Especially when it looks like an under-8s soccer match, where everyone rushes around the pitch chasing the ball.

But we’ve seen this many times, including with the consultancies we serve at Metis, and we know that to get a steadier stream of leads and business through the door, you need to make the right decisions. And that depends critically on information.

Running hot and cold

For example:

To decide whether sales need to go faster or slower, you need a live view of the amount of work that will be delivered over the next, say, 3 months.
That information also affects resourcing – run too hot, and you’ll need to be planning ahead to bring in temporary or freelance staff. Lose sales momentum, and you may have people sitting around doing nothing.

And not all client work delivers the same profit. Let’s say that your marketing activities are bringing a constant stream of leads. If you know which projects and clients/customers are most profitable, you might decide to use the new business to replace less profitable accounts, rather than try to keep selling to them.

We usually find that the consultancies we serve actually do have all the information they need. The problem is it’s squirrelled away in spreadsheets and systems that don’t talk to each other and get out of sync.

We couldn’t find a ready-made solution for that when we ran our own businesses, so we built one. Metis’ award-winning cloud software brings together sales tracking, resource management, job financial control, timesheets and expenses. Because all the information is in one place and is up to date at all times, it can give you answers immediately, taking the drudge out of information-gathering and cutting the risk of taking decisions based on partial or conflicting data. It’s quick and easy to set up and use and comes with a high ROI.

Playing like champions

Now your people can play like the champions they are. You’ve picked the right formation, based on the team’s availability and what you know about the profitability of each customer. You can go out and market yourselves without feast and famine to contend with. The right software will be a foundation for growth and a means to get rid of the clutter of spreadsheets.

This, of course, is where marketing agencies like Your Allies come in. They can advise on all the different ways you can reach your target audience, and how to use each one to its best effect. And you can do lots for yourself, with services such as HubSpot.

Photo by Jonathan Petersson on Unsplash

Your Allies features in another Guardian Small Business showcase: Innovation

11/13/2015 by Linsay Duncan

This initiative focuses on growing small businesses – with home-based roots – which employed innovative ways of making their setup work for them. From turning homes into welcoming, functional client-facing spaces to businesses that make use of cloud-based connectivity and clever online tools to work remotely with clients, there’s lots to learn from these showcase entries.

Read Your Allies’s entry and see how we’ve used tools for video conferencing, messaging, cloud storage and project collaboration to make it easy to work with clients and suppliers remotely. You’ll also see how we established the right balance between cloud collaboration and face-to-face meetings – something we hope will help other small businesses starting out.

Home business 2015-16 competition entry: Your Allies

Working in the flexible way that we do – between being home-based and working on-site with clients – adds to our enjoyment of working at Your Allies. If you’re looking to set your own small business up in a similar way and would like to find out more about the tools we employed, feel free to drop us a line at hi@YourAllies.co.uk.

Interested in reading about our previous entry in The Guardian’s Smarter working showcase
from earlier on this year? Then check it out here: Smarter working 2015: Your Allies

Image courtesy of The Guardian.

With a little help from my apps: productivity tools for SME business leaders

11/11/2015 by Linsay Duncan

12 great productivity online tools to save time by Karola Karlson

From tracking time to scheduling events, these online tools are meant to make the super busy lives of SME business leaders that bit easier.

“I’m a fan of Rescue Time – slick concept – it helped me identify productive VS distracting websites (no, I’m not talking about The Daily Mail). And Toggl, well we’ve been using that for 3+ years now – can’t manage without it. Slack and Trello also get my personal thumbs up. – Linsay Duncan, Co-founder

5 Apps for Small Businesses by Jeremy Fennel

Cash-flow management, web traffic analysis, mobile scanner, file sharing, web conference: 5 great apps to help small business leaders in their day-to-day operations.

“Great to see so many useful and functional Apps for us SME leaders. These really have been thought through with the business leader in mind. Microsoft Lync is worth a go if you’re a heavy web conferencer.” Sabine Popp, co-founder.

Photo credit: Wearesculpt / startupstockphotos.com – Jeshu John / designerspics.com, published unchanged.