Habits.
Habits are the regular behaviors that enable the discipline you follow to succeed.
Habits are the steps to stay on the path of the discipline. Habits are your settled or regular tendencies or practices, whether personally or as a company, good or bad.
People have habits. Companies do too.
Are you in the habit of:
- answering the phone line or sending the caller into a decision tree of nonsense?
- ignoring comments, ratings, reviews on your Google My Business page?
- calling your best customers regularly to stay connected and offer to be of service?
- monitoring every aspect of your customer's experience and continuously improving each and every step?
- listening during your conversations with prospects?
- following up all old quotes, lost proposals, and lost customers?
- creating content regularly?
- sharing helpful ideas and updates regularly?
- proactively prospecting with ideal buyers by calling them?
- waiting for marketing to send over leads?
- assuming all inbound leads are a waste of time?
- continually learning new marketing and sales skills?
- caring for your people first and not just the numbers/quota/pipeline?
- running the same old marketing and sales campaigns and thinking you will see different results?
We recently were involved with an example of what can happen when a company builds good habits.
A company was working with another inbound marketing agency and wanted to grow website traffic and drive more sales qualified leads—a pretty typical scenario in terms of resources and goals.
After six months, the client was not happy with the results. There was no movement in either of the key metrics of traffic and leads. So the client called us.
We began an engagement as a coach/consultant, not as a content creation agency.
We developed a habit of talking to the sales team and customers regularly, learning the issues they were dealing with most often. We hired a contract writer with industry expertise to create blog posts addressing those needs.
The sales team developed the habit of listening for questions about the needs of the prospects and customers and, most importantly, writing them down along with their answers.
Boom! Content that engages the audience because it comes from the audience.
Within the discipline of inbound marketing, a habit of creating customer-focused content is a foundational part of success. Someone who does not know your customer (the inbound agency in this case) cannot create content that engages the audience.
This was an essential habit we helped instill in this client.
Other key habits include regularly monitoring their website performance and correcting all technical SEO issues, developing a site structure and plan and the habit of being consistent with all new content staying within it, and the habit of everyone in the company promoting all content on the critical social media platforms.
After six months, the client had an over 800% increase in website traffic and a 500% increase in sales qualified leads with numerous new customer conversions.
Creating habits within the right disciplines is the key to business growth.
Topics: Inbound Organization
