Episode Transcript
[00:00:01] Speaker A: Made in the UK for HR consultants worldwide. You're listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast.
[00:00:13] Speaker B: Hello James here and welcome to this week's podcast. If you feel like marketing is mysterious dark art, then this episode is for you. In this week's main event, I'm going to Talk you through 4 KPIs I want you to track to help make your marketing easy, predictable and most importantly, measurable. And in this week's Thought of the week, I'm going to talk you through my own CPD framework to help you take action and prioritize business growth over client delivery. So let's jump straight in this week's.
[00:00:41] Speaker A: Main event.
[00:00:44] Speaker B: If you're like most HR consultants I speak to, you probably find that marketing is mysterious dark art. And I completely get why. For your marketing to work, you have to get a huge, happy magic mix of dependable factors, right? Which is why results can feel impossible to predict or measure, because you just don't know how it's going to go down. I suppose it's how business owners feel about hr, really. They think that it's this big intangible, unmeasurable thing. But you and I know that it has a huge impact on the business. And by using the right KPIs and metrics, you can measure the performance of your HR programs quite easily. And you can do the same for marketing. Which is why in this podcast episode, I'm going to Talk you through four KPIs you can track to help give you focus and direction, while also helping you to make your marketing easy, predictable and measurable. Before I do, I need to talk to you about what you're doing wrong and what you need to do instead. Lots of business owners I know do something called one step marketing. That's when you try to grab someone's attention, like send an email or post on LinkedIn and then try to sell to them straight away. This approach doesn't work. Just think about your own behavior right now. How often do you read an email from a business and buy from them straight away? It never happens. It could take weeks, months or even years of consistent contact before you're ready to take action. And that's why you need to add a step so you now have attention, relationship and then sale. Building a relationship with your prospects is a really, really important part of your marketing. So instead of marketing your consultancy with a scattergun approach, you need to use my three step lead generation system instead. Step one is to build multiple audiences like your LinkedIn connections and email marketing list. Step two is to grow a relationship with your audiences. And step three is to convert the relationship. I use this three step system in every business that I work in. This three step system is your lead generation funnel. And everything you do, marketing and sales wise, can fit into one of these three steps. And whenever I get stuck with my own marketing and sales, I sit myself down and ask, what am I doing to grow my audiences this week? What am I doing to build a relationship with my audiences this week? And what am I doing to convert the relationships I have into clients this week? And from there I can create a to do list that's very focused on the outcomes I know I need to achieve to grow in my business. And you can do exactly the same.
So now you know what steps you should be taking to grow your consultancy. You can now use this three step system to create KPIs. Now you're probably thinking, but why would I create marketing KPIs for myself? Doesn't that feel a bit overkill? Well, I think that they're actually really important because they hold you accountable. They not only hold you accountable to implement the right strategies, this three step system, but they also hold you accountable to drive activity. And of course, they can also help you to measure the success of your marketing. So let's jump straight in with the first KPI that you should be tracking. And that's how many people have you added to your list? On a weekly basis, I want you to track how many new LinkedIn connections and email contacts you're getting. This is step one of my three step lead generation system. And this is how you're feeding your consultancy's funnel. So it's a really important activity and KPI to track, because if you aren't building these audiences, then your funnel will immediately dry up as a result. And if you check out episode 17 of this podcast, I'll talk you through how you can do this in an automated way using clever software called Meet Alfred. So let's move on to our second KPI and that's how many appointments have you had? So on a weekly basis, I want you to track how many new appointments you've had that week. So if you listen to episode 17, I'll also talk you through a campaign you can do to try and get a call booked in with your new leads as quickly as possible. And in terms of funnel actions, getting an initial discovery call booked in with your prospects is your second priority. And that's why this KPI is really important to track as part of my flagship video program, how to Package up and sell HR to maim more money. You'll receive a promotional deck that you can use to guide you through these discovery calls and includes all of the information a business owner needs to understand HR and make a decision to buy from you. So be sure to check that out if you haven't already. Obviously, you can make this KPI a little bit more complex by tracking the number of appointments booked versus number of appointments attended because some will inevitably cancel. But just try to keep this simple for yourself. And then what would be really cool is for you to track your connection to appointment conversion rate as a percentage. And by tracking your connection to appointment conversion rate, you'll be able to make tweaks to your campaign to see if it's working or not.
Let's move on to our third KPI and that's how many proposals have you sent out? So once you've had your appointments, you ideally want to get those prospects to proposal stage, which is your third priority in terms of funnel activity. And by tracking this KPI, you can then create a conversion rate from appointment to proposal, which is really important to know too. And again, you can use the promotional deck we've created for you as part of the video program to use as your proposal, which includes all of the information a business owner needs to buy from you. And then you have your fourth and final KPI to track. And that is how many new clients have you got that week. This is obviously the big one that you want to track. And by doing this you'll be able to create your proposal to sale conversion rate, which is really important to know too. So let me just summarize those four KPIs for you again. The first is how many new connections have you made this week. The second is how many appointments have you had this week. The third is how many proposals have you sent out this week. And the fourth is how many clients have you got this week. Tracking these KPIs, like I've said, not only holds you accountable to implement the right strategy and drive action, but by working out the conversion rates between each step, you can also look at your results and think about how you can improve them. I do this a lot with my consulting clients, so we look at each step of their funnel and we look for the weak links. So are you getting enough appointments booked in? What are the quality of your appointments? How many proposals are you sending out and how many of them are converting into clients? And if you're only converting 20% of proposals, we know we have an issue and we can look at the way you're packaging up your services, your pricing, and how you're presenting the proposal in order to help you get the results you want. So there we are. I stress the importance of tracking HR metrics to make it feel more tangible and measurable for business owners, and I think we should be doing the same for our own marketing too. So start by tracking your progress today using those four KPIs and let me know how you get on.
[00:07:33] Speaker A: James Thought of the week.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Foreign.
[00:07:41] Speaker A: Lots.
[00:07:41] Speaker B: Of consultants I know struggle to find the time to grow their business. They're so busy delivering client work or firefighting. Any sort of business development keeps getting pushed to the bottom of their priority list a month after month they aren't making any progress and they just feel stuck. I get it. Running and growing your consultancy can feel like two full time jobs in itself. But remember that your future income and happiness depends on the growth of your business and that requires constant action to help you take action and move the dial. I've adopted the term continual personal development and made it my own to help you do just that. So C is for clarity. If you're feeling stuck, the best thing you can do for yourself is to create clarity. Often people don't take action because they don't know what they should do. And that's why it's really important to seek clarity in everything that you're doing. So what services are you selling, who are you selling those services to, and how are you going to start a conversation with new prospects? All of these details need to be thought about and clarified before you can take action.
P is for prioritize. So once you've created this clarity, you can then look at what you're doing on a daily basis to help you achieve your goals. Obviously you'll have to do some operational stuff and firefighting. We all do. But your priority should be on future growth and you have to prioritize time to make that happen. That might mean starting the day with business growth stuff and finishing the day with emails instead. And a simple switch around your day can help you make stuff happen in your business. And finally, D stands for Delegate. The sooner you realize you can't do everything, the better. If you aren't delegating, you're the bottleneck in your business and you're massively slowing down progress as a result. Often the quickest way to get something done is by delegating it to someone else, whether that's marketing or consultancy. You could sign up to the HR marketing box and get one of our marketing bas to personalize and schedule all of your content for you. Or maybe that's delivering client work so you could find an associate or HR assistant to do some of the work for you to free up your time while still making a profit. So if you don't have the time, think about how you can get it done fast and dedicate it. So that's my version of the CPD framework. Clarify, prioritize, and delegate. So think about your business goals and use this framework to help you take action fast.
[00:10:07] Speaker A: You've been listening to the HR Marketing Guys podcast, helping you to get new clients and create a life you love.
