17 apparent signs of a bad boss

We already know the traits that make a good boss and business owner, but let’s take a look now at the indicator signs of a weak manager.

Not appreciative of employee feedback

When employees ignore policies enforced by the management this implies that they’re in disagreement with the policies and apparently don’t respect the CEO or upper management.

Frequent turnover may indicate a problem with the management. If the salary is above average for the position and still the turnover is beyond the industry standard for that position you reasonably have a problem with the management.

Daniel Foley, CEO of Daniel Foley Marketing Agency

Having a lack of clarity

An alarming sign of a weak manager – lack of clarity. Clarity of purpose, mission, strategy and personal management philosophies are critical for success. A leader who lacks clarity, one who either changes his/her mind too frequently, one who is confused or lacks the fortitude to stick with the direction, will lead the company into the ground. Clarity of purpose and the strength to stick with it are indicators of sustained success.

Ravi Kathuria, Founder of Cohegic Corporation

Publicly criticising employees

One sign of a bad boss is when they give public criticism of their employees. While public praise can make an employee feel valued and respected, public criticism is just cruel. Constructive feedback should be shared in a private space, even if it’s something as small as a correction on email formatting. Keeping criticisms private shows respect for your employees as people, and will motivate them to improve.

Yuvi Alpert, Founder of Noémie

Excluding team members from meetings

Michelle Horlbogen, CEO of The Gentlewoman Boss

Unhappy employees

The first sign of bad management can be seen through the reactions of the employees. If workers aren’t happy, this means that something is wrong with the management. When people constantly leave and resign, this is another red flag. No one wants to stay in a company that treats people badly. Also, when a company constantly gets in trouble, it means that they’re making the wrong decisions. This affects the employees as well since bad decisions can lead to a company closing in a blink of an eye.

Michael Humphreys, Founder and CEO of Z Grills Australia

Constantly micromanaging

In 2019, we lost close to $500K in revenue, which was attributed to lack of delegation. I used to follow up with each employee instead of allowing them to display their potentials and own the process. When I hired an independent HR to audit what was going on, my employees were not happy with my management style. And since we changed this, we have realized double-digit growth.

Today, we only set the overall company objectives and each employee is required to set their own targets and goals based on the company objectives. In this way, they own the process and feel proud of their achievements.

Ronnie Teja, CEO at Branzio

Bad task dissemination

An alarming sign of a bad boss is when he doesn’t know how to effectively manage his subordinates in terms of task dissemination. As a leader, you have to learn how to delegate tasks fairly and make sure that all employees comply with their assignments. An unfair workload may result in employees quitting their jobs and maybe resulting in burnout.

William Taylor, Senior Recruitment Advisor at VelvetJobs

Not respecting time off

To have your work done with the highest quality, the employee should organize their time efficiently. When they work in the office, they need to concentrate on their company tasks. However, each of us needs to maintain a proper life balance and keep track of our time off. Managers should respect that and make sure their personnel is healthy and well-rested. If they start calling you during the weekend and ask for some reports, that might be a sign that it’s time to quit.

Cristina Moraru, Digital Marketing Assistant at Media Training

Overpromising and underdelivering

Paul French, Managing Director at Intrinsic Search

Focusing on the negative

Donna Atanasova, Marketing Specialist at myPOS

Not listening to reports

Markus Goess Saurau, Co-Founder of Sönd

Inability to motivate the team

If the team isn’t excited about the product/service they create, about the process that leads to production, how are they going to motivate buyers and users? High-performance team is fired up. Not knowing how to fire up your team is a sign of lack of management skills.

Natalie Luneva, SaaS growth and team performance coach at Natalie Luneva

Low emotional intelligence

When a leader has low emotional intelligence i.e. is out of touch with themselves and the world around them, they aren’t an effective leader, but instead, a bad boss. This lack of self and social-awareness, curiosity, and self-confidence can be seen in their inability to listen, control their emotions, embrace humility over authority, and guide and empower their team and people through asking insightful (non-leading) questions.

Brittney-Nichole Connor-Savarda, Founder of Catalyst 4 Change

Unreached company goals

Daniel Shapiro, Founder and CEO of Fourlaps

Not taking ownership of issues

As a manager, your job is to make sure the team functions successfully, and take steps to fix the problem when it’s under-performing. It may be productive to identify who caused an issue in the workplace, mostly so you can work with them and keep it from happening again, but it’s a red flag if the boss’ first impulse in response to a crisis is to point the finger instead of looking for solutions.

The real problem here is that the boss has the wrong mindset. They’re concerned with the appearance of success rather than doing the hard work of achieving it. Someone who wants the best for their team and company will do what it takes to improve it, and that means admitting their faults and owning up to their mistakes. Someone who gets defensive in response to criticism is more concerned with their own ego than the good of the team.

Matt Erhard, Managing Partner at Summit Search Group

Rejecting all ideas

Vincent Bradley, CEO and Co-Founder of Proper Wild

Creates a toxic company culture

If your team just seems flat and uninterested in their work, that’s mostly because of the bad boss that creates a toxic company culture. When many businesses think of toxic cultures, they immediately assume it’s all about high staff turnover and high conflict. But in truth, many toxic cultures are actually flat and see teams just coast in their roles rather than take an active interest.

The low-energy toxic company culture can see teams with no enthusiasm about the product or service you provide, let alone your customers.

Lizzie Benton, Founder and Culture Consultant at Liberty Mind

10 marketing automation examples

For those B2B leaders keen on investing or considering marketing automation, here are 10 marketing automation examples worth reading through (and possibly adopting in the future!)

Lead nurturing and email marketing software

About 96% of website visitors come unprepared to buy and when these new leads enter the system, how can one ensure they become acquainted as customers?

Well, most companies handle this by hand, but it mostly results in multiple phone calls and email correspondence. However, the loophole in this procedure is automating those email correspondence along with other tactics.

As marketing automation utilizes email sequences for informing and educating those leads, it enables you to add sales-focused materials and move them closer to sealing the deal with email marketing.

Centralize social media via automation

Mapping out various asset publication over several media channels can get quite messy, particularly in the absence of a centralized tool for managing those channels and assets. 

This is exactly where social media automation helps in saving tremendous time and provide consistency across those social platforms for your business as many of its tools can proactively monitor your brand mentions and/or alert you of interesting topics. If you want to easily manage your social ad campaigns on Facebook and Instagram we suggest to utilize some kind of PPC management software like Adplorer.”

Hence, the presence of an automated tool for scheduling and publishing content across various, if not all social media platform remains unmatched.

Onboarding new customers 

Through marketing automation, you’re able to send off a chain of automated emails that walk the customers through the use of your product and offer reliable advice to help them maximize their investment. Onboarding doesn’t just mean integrating a few features; it requires a smart, structured approach. One powerful method is using client onboarding SAAS to streamline this process. These tools guide new users through your software’s capabilities, ensuring they transition from novices to proficient users effortlessly. For SaaS businesses targeting expansive growth, it’s crucial to optimize customer experiences right from the first interaction.

Buyer intent engagement

Another instance of marketing automation executed fluently is engaging with companies and contacts with an interest in your products/services through an automated manner. 

This leads us to buyer intent vendors. These vendors look for trends within the web behavioral organization to detect variances in comparison to historic trends. 

There are several vendors found within the buyer-intent space and when utilized properly, it can require minimized human interaction while producing increased results.

Action-triggered notification on sales

It’s no surprise that certain web pages are visited by leads that share a high interest in your product and these pages could be anything from price page to terms and conditions. 

Visits to any of these pages could indicate a possible purchase from the customer’s end, hence, failing to contact them during this time can result in a huge missed opportunity.

By utilizing emails to contact leads that visit your page with sales materials, it helps your business to familiarize with buy-ready prospects and capitalize on that.

Reducing churn rate via automation

For SaaS or other companies with monthly product subscription, churn remains a serious issue as securing continuous customer subscription is incredibly essential for growing a stable and reliable revenue stream.  
Companies in the field are fiercely competitive, all vying for valuable B2B partnerships which can be made easier by implementing a SaaS SEO strategy. This will allow you to grow leads, generate sales and improve online marketing funnels.

As customers often cancel subscriptions for various reasons, automating the questioning process when they cancel helps in reducing your churn rate.

Offering a discount to those that cancel is a great start for reducing the churn rate and let’s not forget, it’s an excellent automation task as handling it by hand is extremely time-consuming. 

Managing CRM data

Clean data is extremely vital for maintaining effective marketing campaigns, however, CRM database gets messy in an instant – this is something marketing automation tools can help out with. 

Such an automation tool is offered by our member ZoomInfo. Their tool automatically updates or appends the CRM records based on your specified rules. With clean data, sales and marketing teams can interact at the right time with the right crowd.

But there are several data fields you should keep intact, such as contact and company owner, phone, lead source, company revenue, and employee count, etc.

Referral marketing and B2B customer retention

Referral marketing is no doubt the best source for many companies to garner new leads. After all, nothing can beat the legitimacy of a product recommended by a trusted friend/source. 

So, why not automate those mundane tasks involved in performing referral marketing operations? You can offer discounts for customers that refer to products and track those referrals through automation.

While promoting referral program via regular broadcast emails helps in informing new customers about the program and its benefits.

Relevant content

For leads that are already interested in your product/service, the key to keeping them further engaged is ‘relevance’. 

As such, automating the dispatch of relevant content is worth the keep as it educates them and narrows the amount of information they receive from your end. 

By blocking out other emails and putting more focus on the product/service of their particular interest, you’ll be able to rope them in and move them further down the tunnel while qualifying their interest.

Automated website live chat

Live website chats are great for capturing leads, but a recurring issue here is employing someone to oversee the live chat. Now, for those with an existing hectic customer support team, this will surely take up enough time to hinder daily duties.

However, thanks to marketing automation, today various solutions enable B2B businesses to maintain a beneficial live chat without hiring employees to oversee it.

Take, for example, the Collect.chat tool that provides customers an automated interaction with your company and connect them with your customer support reps. 

Conclusion

While marketing automation remains highly successive for B2B businesses, it’s essential to have a clear understanding of your buyers and putting up content that resonates with such an audience.

Because this is something that will ultimately define the success and reliability of marketing automation for your brand. 

Hopefully, with the marketing automation examples provided, you’ll now have a profound insight into how marketing automation can be efficiently utilized to drive success for your business.

What is CRM strategy?

The customer relationship management strategy, aka CRM strategy, focuses on transforming every prospect into a client on the basis of every piece of conversation and communication with them. This method has encouraged good communication with the clients and help in solving their problems related to the services in their field of business. It helps to interact more with the audience and achieve their target and goals.

The benefits of CRM when applied multi-level

The CRM strategy should be applied equally and followed in all aspects and business levels if you want good results from it. All the departments have to equally follow the website marketing strategy to make it work efficiently for your business. 

If you are able to follow the strategy properly, you will be able to experience the benefits of customer relationship management soon enough.

1. It will help to reduce the cost of customer acquisition.
2. It will increase customer loyalty and lifetime value.
3. Decision-making will be done on the basis of precise data, so no need to fear decisions.
4. Enhances forecasting and communication with the clients.
5. Enhances efficiency in marketing.
6. Boost sales volume.
7. Better visibility in execution.
8. Reduce the volume of email

All these are the benefits of CRM when applied ideally. If you are unable to follow it, you have a high chance of risk and disadvantages in your business.

1. With a lack of communication, customers can feel dissatisfied and might not like to trade with your organization.
2. If you are not able to communicate properly with the prospects and audience, you will not be able to cross-sell or upsell your services and goods. Missing such opportunities directly refers to lesser profits.
3. You will be unable to attract a new audience and retain the older ones.

You will lose in the competition in your field and your brand awareness will become low with time.

CRM strategy best practices for maximum effectiveness

All of the above-mentioned factors make it clear that it is very important to develop a CRM strategy for your company. According to research, it is stated that most of the business will struggle in building and developing a CRM strategy that can be proved efficient for your business. 

Set a goal

It is very important to have a clear vision so that you can set goals and achieve them with the help of your CRM strategy. Your strategy can be designed and developed in such a way that you are able to meet up your goals and measure your progress easily. You can check metrics for measuring progress for different factors and accordingly reset the goals. 

Your ultimate goal should be clear in your mind and CRM strategy should be designed accordingly. It should also be designed keeping in mind the customer experience as it plays a major role in making a business successful. 

Synchronise the CRM strategy with other strategies

An effective CRM strategy should show progress in every quarter of the business. It should determine the scope in every single phase so that the wholesome goals can be achieved. This strategy should actually act as a roadmap that makes a positive impact in every business process.

CRM strategy focuses on strategic goals for example better efficiency in marketing and increasing customer’s long-term value. However, the companies have other corporate strategies that focus on boosting revenue growth and providing a good experience to the customer. These strategies focus on different factors for achieving the goals for the company. But, it is very essential that both of these strategies align and complement each other. The CRM strategy should also focus on corporate goals for fulfilling your goals. If your CRM strategy is not able to address the corporate goals, it is very difficult for your business to sustain. 

Check and examine existing data

The existing data plays a great role in developing a CRM strategy as it contains all the details about the customer choices and their experiences with your company. It helps to get insights into customer’s journey and based on that journey and experience, analyze their personas. Data analysis also helps you to understand the problems faced by the clients while trading with your company. Now, you can improve and work on such problems so that the new clients don’t have to face the same issue.

You can segment customers into different groups based on their experiences with your company. Dividing the audience into different groups will help you to initiate a conversation differently and target them according to their choices and demands. Regular customers can be given more preference and can be given special discounts for keeping them connected. 

Provide effective support channels

The main aim of a solid CRM strategy is to provide support channels and communicate more and more with the audience. Communication with the audience helps in encountering the problems faced by them.

When you listen to your client’s problems and try to solve them, your customers will be satisfied with your services and stick by you. One of the methods of support channels is to create an option of live chat which will provide customers with instant solutions to their problem. It also helps in increasing conversion rates. Other than this, you can also go for social media channels for solving issues faced by customers. The method is not important, listening and solving customer’s problems is what is needed the most.

Use the best CRM software

Most of the companies often select inefficient CRM software for their business and regrets their decision later. It is very important to research and gather information about the software you choose. Good CRM software is one that integrates with your business operations and works efficiently for your work. You can also compare and collect data on the software used by your competitors. 

You can also check reviews and experiences of the other customers by visiting the forums for choosing the perfect CRM software for you. CRM software uses CRM strategies for getting good results in their business. An ideal CRM solution helps to manage the communication and interaction with all the customers through a digital platform.  

Different CRM software is available in the market, you can get into the details and research each one of them. Research as much as you can but ultimately choose the one that fits best for the operations performed by your company. Always remember that your CRM software should provide you with good results in every field of the business. 

Sometimes, a company is not ready for a CRM strategy and does it in the wrong way. Here are some warning signs that define if your company is ready to develop the strategy and what needs to be done in the case it isn’t:

• If you are not able to make long-term investments and are not able to process and work that way, you should first do a good job on CRM projects and learn.
• If your company is not able to achieve the strategic goals even after the proper execution of all the strategies, then you should try to focus and learn about tactical gains.
• If your company lacks in the integration of data and is not able to clear up the databases, then you should try to limit the dependencies from external data and go for outsourced services.
• If you have numerous CRM solutions, and support systems and it gets difficult to manage the overall strategy, then you should reduce it for fewer business units.
• If an external competition is going on between VP’s of different departments, then you should limit it to a single domain.

Improve Business Workflow With CRM Integration

When you use CRM integration correctly, it can become one of the most powerful tools your company can have.Building relationships that cater to the wants and needs of your customers is never done by accident. It takes time and effort, but it is the most important part of your business.

CRM integrations streamline your email and social media marketing, your leads and customer contact information, and your sales process. The quicker you simplify things, the faster you can grow in other areas of your business that demand your attention.

You can start with automated emails, social media engagement, and SMS promotional campaigns to get more eyes on your new product line after a launch for example. You can craft pre-written emails to save time when sending out reminders to prospects about new offers. Set them up once and that’s it.

CRM software allows you to laser focus on targeting new leads and prospects, while strengthening existing relationships at the same time. Integrations help you use the customer qualities you find to your advantage—with little to no effort. You will instantly improve your workflow by knowing what to focus on, and removing manual errors in the process. That’s what makes CRM integration so worthwhile.

Conclusion

Technological advancement has made huge progress and made it an important key factor of success for all kinds of business. In order to sustain a business, it is very essential to adapt to these modifications. Along with the time, CRM will implement various changes for making a good impact in business and helping it to grow. If you want to increase sales and increase your conversion rates, you should definitely follow these tricks and increase conversion rates for your business.