When summer sets in, the allure of sunny days and warmer temperatures can sometimes lead to a dip in productivity, making maintaining team motivation a paramount concern for business leaders. However, with extra foresight and strategic initiatives, you can counteract this seasonal lull and ensure that your team remains engaged and efficient throughout the coming months.
Many of your employees may be distracted or even overwhelmed by their various commitments over the next few months, which may include weekend getaways, full-length vacations, or kids being home for break. To help with their work-life balance, consider allowing a flexible work schedule just for summer. For instance, you could create “Summer Fridays,” days in which your team members have a half or full day off or have the option to work from home. By offering them opportunities to take advantage of the season, you can not only boost their morale but also enable them to be more focused while they are at work. Similarly, while it may seem counterintuitive, encourage your employees to use their vacation time; a well-rested and happy team is likely to be more energized and productive when they return.
Although summer can often be a slower season for many businesses, it’s still paramount to have goals for your organization, whether you revisit those set at the beginning of the year or take advantage of the season’s energy and enthusiasm to create new ones. Perhaps you could seek ways to refresh your marketing and sales strategies or identify areas where you can cut back on spending. Such targets can give a sense of direction and purpose, allowing each person on your team to better understand what they can do to contribute to the larger mission. Additionally, encourage your employees to set individual objectives that align with your organization’s overall vision, such as developing a new skill or engaging more with different departments. By instilling a goal-oriented mindset, you can empower your employees to stay focused, inspired, and engaged throughout summer and beyond.
Fostering a positive, productive work environment requires recognizing and rewarding your team’s hard work, especially during the summer months when they may find their eyes straying toward the windows. To help them remain driven, create different incentives that align with the spirit of the season. For instance, if your sales team reaches its target number of closed deals for a month, you could provide an all-team reward of going to an outdoor experience such as hiking, zip lining, or another activity local to your area. You can also create individual incentives, like an extra day of PTO or tickets to an amusement park, to motivate each employee to stay dedicated to their tasks. Paired with regular words of appreciation and encouragement, these perks will better ensure that your team feels their hard work is acknowledged, naturally pushing them to continue improving.
Creating volunteer opportunities can be an excellent way to boost employee motivation. Engaging in community service not only fosters a sense of teamwork and camaraderie but also allows your employees to make a positive impact outside the workplace. This summer, organize an event where everyone can come together to support a local charity and help those in need. You could also give a PTO day employees can use to volunteer for a cause of their choice, which would still provide a refreshing break from the usual routine while instilling a sense of purpose and fulfillment. Whether it’s participating in an environmental cleanup, spending a day passing out groceries, or supporting a specific cause that’s close to heart, the act of giving back can create lasting memories and raise your team’s morale.
To help your employees reengage with your company and its vision, consider hosting general brainstorming sessions once or twice a month. Amid the mental sluggishness summer can bring, these get-togethers can inject a burst of energy into your team and foster the creativity and innovation your company needs to continue growing. These could be as formal or informal as you like, either held in a conference room or even outdoors if possible. Regardless of the setting, though, encourage open dialogue to ensure that each individual feels comfortable sharing their unique ideas for your company. From fresh project concepts and solutions to present challenges to new initiatives for Q3 and Q4, you never know what might result from such free thinking.
Summer is surely a time for fun, but it’s also a great season to push your company to new heights. Implement these strategies, and you can enhance employee motivation, fostering a productive and positive atmosphere for your business throughout the months ahead.
TAKE ACTION:
Determine if your business could benefit from implementing one or more of these motivational strategies this summer.
When most people see email ads pop up in their inboxes, they typically tend to either skim them in a few-second scroll or simply delete them without so much as a second glance. As the sender, this creates a specific challenge when trying to boost brand exposure or sell your service: How can you devise mass emails that snag the recipients’ attention before they get dismissed?
Thankfully, like most marketing tactics, email campaigns are salvageable if you simply step back and tweak your strategy. These tips can help you better use them to direct prospects down the lead funnel, ultimately turning strangers into loyal patrons.
When planning email campaigns, you may feel a certain temptation to take the shotgun approach. Surely, the more people you launch them toward, the better your odds that something will stick, right? However, just as a male senior citizen may likely have little interest in emails about what’s new at Sephora, sending emails to incompatible clients will ultimately yield underwhelming results. To increase your ROI, you need to build an engaged subscriber list based on your target demographic. Naturally, the first step toward doing so is identifying your ideal customer. Who has a particular need for the product or service you sell? In which groups (e.g., age, education level, geographic location, line of work) would you categorize them?
Even if your product or service does have universal appeal, you should still avoid conducting email blasts with no specific audience. Instead, isolate a share of the public that would align with your organization’s unique brand identity. For instance, if your primary offering is bottled water, target fitness fanatics or avid travelers who tend to buy it more frequently. These hyperrelevant groups may be more likely to not only read your emails but also follow links to your website and browse your products.
Once you know exactly who you intend to reach, you need to obtain subscribers. An effective means of doing so is filing addresses from warm leads in your CRM. Anytime your salespeople reach out to someone who engaged with your social media or requested a sample of your products, they should ask for an email address—particularly if that prospect is an appropriate fit for your brand.
Adding a lead-generation tool to your website can also help you acquire a lucrative contact list. Offer site visitors white papers, product guides, or other items of value in exchange for their email addresses. Because these leads are already engaging with your website and potentially interested in what you sell, they’re the perfect recipients of your future messaging.
To take a lot of the hassle out of emailing these contacts, enroll in an email marketing automation service. A platform such as Mailchimp, Omnisend, or Brevo can easily send, track, and follow up on emails to contacts from your CRM, helping you gauge their effectiveness and make adjustments where needed.
If you’ve ever ignored an email notification—which you surely have—then you know these messages have a few seconds at most to capture attention before being deleted or forgotten. To engage more recipients, you must sell your organization in a five-to-seven-word subject line; that’s even less forgiving than the classic sixty-second elevator pitch.
Email subject lines must quickly convince your audience that you have something useful to offer. Draw their eyes with attention-grabbing verbiage such as “Alert,” “Free,” or “Urgent,” and sell your product or service with unique language. (After all, who’s to say that a direct competitor isn’t emailing your prospects too?) You’ll also earn bonus points for featuring emojis, which stand out with their colorful shapes and conversational tone.
Additionally, don’t forget the value of a nice hook. Consider these sample subject lines:
Notice how the former is blandly straightforward and informative, while the latter poses a mystery the email body will answer. (What makes the fasteners “groundbreaking”? Are they currently available?) Such intrigue will entice recipients to open the email for more details, at which point they’ve taken the bait—now it’s up to the email’s content to reel them in.
To help convert prospects, you need to create email copy that is compelling from beginning to end while also including necessary information. Your emails should always contain:
Moreover, ensure that your email copy follows good SEO practices: include well-written yet digestible prose with relevant keywords and multiple subheads. At the same time, keep your emails brief, between 50 and 125 words; your contacts likely don’t have time to read a full article. If you’re discussing intricate topics, you can always link to a blog on your website that dives deeper.
Ultimately, each email should do more than just sell your product—it should also be conversational, informative, and entertaining to read. If you can pull that off, readers may actually grow to look forward to receiving your letters.
According to 2023 HubSpot research, segmented emails earn 30 percent more opens and 50 percent more click-throughs, so if you haven’t already, initiate a drip campaign. This strategy involves sending unique messages to leads based on their position in the funnel. For instance, send separate emails to welcome and onboard new contacts, follow up with those who shopped but didn’t purchase (“You have great taste”), check in with leads that have cooled (“We miss you!”), thank converted leads for their purchases, and offer back-end customer support (“Rate your experience”). Such emails will feel personalized to the recipient, making them more eager to read your communication and click embedded links.
Email campaigns don’t end when you hit Send—you must also periodically review how subscribers are interacting with your messaging. Many email automation platforms, along with services like Google Analytics, can provide this valuable data. Crucial metrics to review include open rates, click-through rates (the percentage of readers who follow an email link), and conversion rates (what share goes on to make a purchase).
By analyzing this data, you can closely monitor the success of your email campaigns. Should you find that certain correspondences underperform, make continuous adjustments to them until the analytics tick in your favor. With enough diligence, you’re bound to identify a successful strategy that attracts more leads, holds their attention, and converts them into satisfied customers.
TAKE ACTION:
Work with an email automation service to design engaging campaigns, and apply these tips to send higher-conversion messages.
For many salespeople, the most dreaded, cringeworthy moment of the sales process arrives during the close: asking people to refer them to friends and family. No matter how they approach it or what language they use, it inevitably just feels so . . . salesy.
Ultimately, though, requesting referrals is worth it because they are one of the most powerful tools for growing your business. Here are some easy ways you can turn your network of clients into raving, referring fans.
First and foremost, it’s crucial that you’re strategic about the more passive type of referrals: reviews. Make it easy for clients to leave feedback by creating a dedicated referral page on your website and offering multiple review channels—think email, social media, and text messaging. This will emphasize that you don’t just welcome but eagerly want to hear their opinions. (As a bonus, you’ll come across as super confident about your products or services.) Then be sure to share the most positive customer testimonials wherever you can in your marketing.
You’ve surely heard of “truth in advertising”: by law, you have to be truthful, not misleading, when marketing a product or service. But in a sense, that only goes so far—especially when it comes to self-promotion. Seriously, do you think a business would ever make an ad that says, “We’re OK, but others out there are better”? No way! One hundred percent of the time, it will say something along the lines of “We’re the best, and here’s why.”
That’s why what really matters to customers is other customers’ opinions about a business. And, interestingly, the volume of reviews is way more important than the quality of them. I know that sounds counterintuitive—you always want positive feedback—but the truth is that no matter how incredible a review from someone is, if it’s only one of five, it won’t have much of an impact. Say you’re shopping online for a lawnmower. If your choice is down to one with dozens of reviews versus one with thousands and the average star rating is even remotely close, you’ll choose the one that shows strength in numbers.
Another factor to consider is whether you should cast a narrow, specific referral net or a wide, broader one. I highly recommend doing the latter, and here’s why. By going broad, you are guaranteed to reach more people—even those at the top of your funnel. Through this touchpoint, you can plant the seed of a relationship with each of them, which you can then nurture and potentially turn into a customer down the line. In other words, if you include as many people as possible when seeking referrals, you can potentially multiply your client base dramatically.
Never underestimate how often business success comes down to how many people know, like, and trust you. After all, by recommending you to a friend, a raving fan is putting both their relationship with that person and their own credibility on the line—so you must earn that commitment.
The easiest way to do this is to connect with clients on a personal level, either directly or, if you lead a large company, through your people. I love what Garrett Maroon, a Virginia-based real estate agent, succinctly called it as a guest on our Stay Paid podcast: systematic relationship building. “People don’t want to be a transaction,” he said. “They want a relationship. You need to take a real interest in your client relationships and consistently prove that you care.”
That means staying in touch with them regularly—not just to sell your wares but to ask how they are doing and celebrate life events like birthdays, as a friend would. It’s also an opportunity to make their lives easier, such as by referring them to trustworthy professionals in other fields, highlighting a local community event, offering discounts, or even making a donation in their name. If you put effort into your client relationships and provide them with more true value, you’ll be amazed by how the referrals keep coming in.
Finally, practice makes perfect. Don’t just ask for referrals once in a while; make it a regular part of your sales process by training your sales team—and even yourself, if you don’t already—to continuously seek them. Something as simple as requesting one in your email signature can do the trick. On the other end of the spectrum, consider running regular referral campaigns to boost your momentum. Most importantly, get in the habit of asking for a referral at the peak of client engagement: at, or even right before getting to, the closing table.
When it comes to referrals, businesses sometimes blow my mind. They’ll pay thousands of dollars for an ad lead, and yet they’ll ignore the free ones literally right in front of them in the form of their existing clients. So shed the shyness and show confidence in your rock-solid business relationships, knowing that reviews and referrals—if done right—are a win-win for everybody.
TAKE ACTION:
Integrate at least one of these referral strategies into your sales process, and track how it impacts your bottom line.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Luke Acree is an authority on leadership, a lead-generation specialist, and a referral expert who has helped more than 100,000 entrepreneurs and small businesses grow their companies. He hosts Stay Paid, a sales and marketing podcast, and has been featured in Entrepreneur, Forbes, and Foundr.com.
When it comes to achieving sustainable profitability in a competitive market, the key is providing your clients with unparalleled value. Bob Burg, motivational speaker, consultant, and coauthor of The Go-Giver: A Little Story about a Powerful Business Idea, offers a strategy for doing so consistently: adopting a “go-giver” mentality. This means showing up for others meaningfully, providing what they need to help them move closer to contentment. Implement the principles outlined in this guide, and you’ll be well on your way to better securing customer loyalty and, in turn, establishing a solid business foundation.
The worth of a product or service is determined by its ability to solve problems, fulfill needs, and elicit satisfaction from the end user. This received value should always be greater than the cost paid by the consumer to ensure that they feel like they more than got their money’s worth. The question is, how can you achieve that? It comes down to you, your expertise, and the trust you build with your customers. They are investing in you before your company, product, or service, so you must prove yourself to be a resource that provides value on top of your commodity. When you do, consumers will happily pay the price for it.
According to Burg, the law of value relies on five key elements:
When you can successfully communicate these elements to customers, you remove price and competition from the picture. Demonstrate both your value and your product’s value, and they won’t hesitate to buy.
Your business’s income essentially hinges on two factors: how many people you serve and how effectively you meet their needs. Naturally, the bigger your client base, the more money you’ll make, and by focusing on delivering value, you can grow it organically through repeat business and referrals. When you do more than your client expects or has paid for, they will likely become your advocate, spreading the word about your product or service to those in their sphere who may also benefit from it. Such word of mouth may not only expand your reach but also exponentially increase your revenue and income.
The key to maximizing your influence lies in prioritizing your customers’ needs and interests. After all, they don’t care about your quota or how nice you are; they care only about how you can improve their lives. This necessitates that you shift your focus away from “me” and turn the spotlight on “them.” Make your goal their success—when they win, you win.
However, it’s not about being a doormat or neglecting your own aspirations but about building genuine relationships. Remember the golden rule of sales: people do business with those they know, like, and trust. By simply being present, available, and invested in their journey, understanding their perspective, and offering solutions, you will transform from a salesperson into a trusted partner, strengthening the influence you can have on their purchasing decisions.
As touched on with the law of value, you are ultimately the most valuable thing you have to offer customers—but that value is only possible when you engage in authenticity. Burg puts it this way in The Go-Giver: “As long as you’re trying to be someone else, or putting on some act or behavior someone else taught you, you have no possibility of truly reaching people.” Although letting down your guard, at least in certain ways, may initially seem intimidating, demonstrating vulnerability and relating to customers on a personal level will ultimately lead to greater rewards.
Burg’s philosophy states that true generosity thrives on being open to receiving; in fact, it can even be a powerful form of giving back. When you confidently and graciously accept gifts in any form from others, you acknowledge their value and validate their efforts. And when you sincerely accept their advice and actively listen to their insights, you show appreciation and gratitude. In this way, receiving can strengthen your relationships, ensuring that you can rely on them for years to come.
Even in business, sometimes the simplest shift in mindset can make all the difference. Through the go-giver approach, you can cultivate trust and goodwill with both potential and existing clients, ultimately paving the way for greater professional success.
TAKE ACTION:
Assess the wants and needs of your clients and prospects to determine how you can better serve them and deliver greater value.
