Common Knowledge | Wondering something?
Sales and Marketing Tips
Don’t Be Afraid to Ask for Things and the Nature of Expertise
Everyone here is so generous with their time and expertise, so don’t be afraid to ask them for stuff you need.
Adrianne was generous enough to share her expertise with us on a recent Growth Guide panel she hosted. The only unanimous thing GGs agreed on was don’t use a code, and make sure your discount applies. There was no single right answer or structure that would scale your business. She was blown away by the amount we’ve all learned about this industry.
Don’t Make Assumptions about other People’s Emotions and Motives
Something may appear a certain way, but it’s actually completely something else. Don’t be afraid to ask clear cut questions.
TH tweeted an ad and asked his audience to guess the conversion rate on the CTC ad. When AO saw the Tweet, he went deep down a rabbit hole of trying to understand why Taylor did that and what he was thinking.Turns out he was just trying to compare distribution between Tweets and Fleets.
The Way You Phrase a Question Determines Foam Walls
The biggest dependency is getting experts in the room, and getting the time that you need.
Aaron has been wondering about Google sales performance for a while now. He flipped the question around and asked why we don’t have Google Shopping and Email Marketing pages. So, they put them together, and they’re already crushing in Google search.
Ask for What You Want
We’re at 532 registrants for our Round Table webinar. Kalviyo is featuring us in three of their upcoming emails, and we’ve got creative control.
Taylor told AO to also ask for a webinar with Mandi next. And they said yes! It never hurts, and often pays, to ask.
Know the Growth Page
All our service pages have been replaced with a Growth page, outlining the latest in terms of what we do for our clients. This is the combined awesome effort of teams across the company.
If you have any thoughts or feedback whatsoever, don’t hesitate, send it to Aaron O.
Before you visit this page, please install the GA Opt-Out in your browser if you haven’t already.
https://commonthreadco.com/pages/growth
Don’t Gate our Marketing Material
We are punching way above our weight-class with our COVID content. Try Googling any number of “coronavirus” “ecommerce” “data” and “effect” terms and we’re page one across the board. The data hustle that Cherene put in up front is really driving the value of our content. AO didn’t think this was possible, he just thought it would be kind of a neat project.
There are a lot of people releasing similar content right now. Some of it is designed prettier. They all have a webinar or an eBook or are gated to see the data. Which great about what we’re doing is there’s not a single upgrade, no gating, everything is a direct sharing of content.
Don’t gate it, just put it out there.
Seize the Moment for Marketing
It’s tough to get client sign-off to use data and examples for our sales and marketing material. It’s much easier to get that sign-off in the moments when things are going exceedingly well, and they’re interested in giving back to CTC.
Capitalize on those moments to get sign-off to share awesome data and stories with the Marketing team.
| Explore the New Case Studies Page- Check it out! https://commonthreadco.com/pages/case-studiesLook it over and Slack feedback to Reilly and Paul! |
Grow the Biz
Our business has been substantially growing over time. Right now, we are proud to say that May was our biggest month yet.
In May alone, we closed 16 new deals. In July, we’ve closed 14 deals, and three more contracts. Between Matt, Pete, and Chris, and the efforts of everyone else in the company doing fantastic work, we’re continuing to push boundaries.
Nail the Offer
AO has been listening to Andrew’s podcasts, and here’s him talk constantly about the offer, and figuring out what people want.
When AO dropped the roundtable to end all roundtable that page has a 50% conversion rate, because it’s something that people clearly want.
If you hit product market fit, goodnight.
Send It
We are growing the business across the board. This month (May), in contractually obligated revenue inked is $1.799M:
- 8 opt-outs
- 760k of minimum obligation
- 3 service upsells
- $40k in creative upsells
- $47k in expert COVID creative
- Chris, Matt, and Pete brought in $760k in new business
This is a ton of work by everyone across the board, and something to be super proud of.
Our organic search traffic is up 50% month-over-month. There is a model by which this business is building that will continue to yield results in the future.
Give First
Because we never spent a ton of money with Kalviyo, we never got an extraordinary amount of press from them. Following the work, we’ve done through Covid to keep giving away valuable, non-gated content, they’ve partnered with us (and just us) on a huge new piece of content and webinar.
Persist
Last year, when we finished the year, we had an increasing churn rate and decreasing average value. Because of this reality, we had to make some tough decisions. One of these decisions was being more selective of who we work with.
We grew from 11k to over 16k in average client value YoY. Through our first big way of retention moments this year, we kept 100% of our clients.
Our sales team is learning and firing and growing, and we’re doing a great job increasing AOV and driving LTV through retention.
This transition has been confusing and tough at times, but the intention of the transition is working, both in terms of the work we’re doing and the clients we’re working with.
Go International
In Chris’ dream to go international, he’s had the chance to work with teams that are doing just that in big ways. This is one great example.
Hit the Buzzer!
Take a chance and hit that buzzer, you can figure out the answers later.
An idea Dane heard a long time ago is: “hit the buzzer before you know how to do what to do.” On game shows, you click the button first, then you figure out the answer. In this week Dane started a weekly course on Monday, it got picked up by Forbes on Tuesday and jumped to over 400 people. What Dane was struck by is that the problems he’s solving are the one he’s solving as he’s going, and they’re guaranteed to be the important ones.
Seize the Moment
The business is growing and it’s growing well. Coming into Friday of last week the world was completely contaminated and so were all our deals. In the last three days, thanks to the focus of Chris, Peter, and Matt, we’ve got new deals coming through in the areas that are set up for growth in this climate.
The biggest thing that AW has learned is that the amount of social platform interaction is translating into business now. It’s making the sales job a whole lot easier conveying the value of us trying to help people, not just take money from people.
It’s been exciting to see the trajectory start to increase on the BD side.
Make Great Proposals
Making great proposals will lock your client in.
On the front end, here’s how we’re responding to clients who give us access to their accounts. After an initial discussion with BD, we get access to various business accounts and highlight some opportunities for the client. We start with account structure, then a creative analysis of baseline AIDA metrics, and a demo of a diverse video toolkit from an example client. Then we bring the Tony Chopp hammer session on Google and run through Nautilus tools on metrics like CAC.
People want to know more about their business than about the fancy bells and whistles we have as an agency. All they really care about is their own account and the impact we can have there. The key is to take an opportunity, highlight it, and provide a road map and a structure for moving forward.
Aaron OMG
Aaron’s been published in the fucking New York Times. That is all.
Your Colleagues Don’t Read Anything You Write. Here Are 8 Ways to Change That-
<figure class=”wp-block-embed-wordpress aligncenter wp-block-embed is-type-wp-embed is-provider-the-new-york-times”><div class=”wp-block-embed__wrapper”>
</div><figcaption> Your Colleagues Don’t Read Anything You Write. Here Are 8 Ways to Change That. </figcaption></figure>https://www.nytimes.com/svc/oembed/html/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F2020%2F03%2F04%2Fsmarter-living%2Fyour-colleagues-dont-read-anything-you-write-here-are-8-ways-to-change-that.html#?secret=yTCgcJxuUD
Reilly is Better at Twitter than Taylor and Aaron
Enough said.
Leverage Partnerships
We’ve got lots of partners helping us promote ADmission’s free enrollment period for the next two weeks. All it really takes is an ask to get this kind of cross-promotional leverage going. The power of requests is strong, the worst thing they can say is “no.”
Everyone Always Be Selling
Matty Ax doesn’t get a chance to see much of the work he does once he sells something. He knows our teams do great work, but he rarely gets to see it. He did get to see it this week, for a brand with a lot of potential beyond what we brought them on for. We’re working to get their trust and bring more of their service needs to CTC.
He learned that growing the business is not exclusive to the sales team, it is an entire company.This last expansion of service would not have been possible without the Retention team.