Let’s talk about management teams. This is a topic I’m asked about a lot by founders and CEOs. The questions go like this:

•    Who needs a management team?
•    When is the right time to start building a management team?
•    How do I put the right team in place?
•    How do I know if my team is working?
•    How do I build a great team?

You can call it an Executive Team, a Leadership Team (very “in” at the moment), a Senior Management Team, or if your company is small enough, just the management team. Whatever term you choose to use, this is your most important team in the long run. This is the group of people who will help you build your business.

The answer to the question “who needs a management team?” is anybody who wants more than a “lifestyle business”; anybody who wants to build a sustainable, growing company. Even lifestyle business owners reach a point where they need a team.

Recently I met with the founder of a 30-employee company that is struggling with dropping profits, missed deadlines and an increasing number of unhappy customers. He had spent a lot of time blaming unscrupulous competitors, rising costs, ineffective sales people and anything else that didn’t require him to take a close look at the way his company is being run. He was getting nowhere and called me him to help him find and fix the cause of his problems.

He looked blankly at one of my first suggestions: “Let’s look at your org chart”.

“We don’t have an org chart,” he said. “We’re too small for that stuff.”

I knew then I was on the right track.

Organization charts are a powerful tool for managing a company of any size.  It can help the transition from you doing everything to you assigning responsibility for tactical actions to others.

By multiple accounts, increasing knowledge worker productivity is a priority for CEOs in 2012 --just as it was in 2011, and 2010 and so on. Why not make 2012 the year you actually do it?

There’s a simple yet powerful tool you can use to easily gain several productive hours per week per knowledge worker – week after week after week. I’m not kidding: two to three hours per employee per week.  

Let’s call it a position contract. It’s like a job description only better. It will change the way you manage your people.

If you’re one of the many software CEOs whose company doesn’t have job descriptions, don’t stop reading! I know job descriptions seem boring and too “corporate”. I know you may think you’re too small for them. You’re not.

Here’s why position contracts (and job descriptions) are so powerful.

Success – as you already know – brings its own challenges. In the case of a growing software company, those challenges include a whole bunch of “mores”: more clients; more employees; more products; more distribution channels; more cash flow issues; more stuff to worry about.

These may be high-class challenges, but they’re very real. According to Verne Harnish in Mastering the Rockefeller Habits, there are mathematical formulas for complexity that show as you grow from two products, employees or sites to four products, employees or sites, your complexity increases by a factor of 12.

Sooner or later, every growing company reaches the limits of its current way of doing business. Think of this as a rite of passage. When this happens, things begin to go strangely wrong. And that can get expensive.

Here are nine signs that your company may be pushing on or passed the limits of its current management capabilities:

Want to build your revenue and/or profits? Improve efficiencies and effectiveness? Increase customer retention? Get more add-on business from existing customers?  Cut non-value expenses?  Of course you do. We all do.

There’s a “secret” weapon that makes accomplishing the above not only possible but fast and inexpensive – even in this economy. It’s a great competitive advantage because it’s used by so few companies. I discovered it, implemented it, tested it and simplified it over 25+ years of working with more than 100 businesses. I didn’t make it up. I just use it. It’s called good management.

Don’t stop reading yet! I know enough software company owners to know the word “management” turns off a lot of people. It sounds boring. It sounds too corporate. It even sounds a little confusing.

But here’s what good management can do. (These are real examples.)

• Cost of sales reduced by 83%

How would you like to get more website visitors to clicks that Buy Now button - or Contact Me or Download our Latest Report, or Take a Product Tour. It’s not hard to do with a little testing.

The examples I listed above are all calls to action. Not surprising, these are one of the most critical aspects of your website - anything that gets a visitor to do something that moves them farther along the path to becoming a paying customer.

Calls to action can be in the form of text links, buttons, images and just about anything else you can think of on a web page. How you present these calls to action has a big affect on how many people take the action. And you’re not limited to just one type.

In addition to testing the type of link, you can test:

• placement on the page

4 factors that affect your chances of converting website visitors

Have you ever wondered why website visitors are quick to take some actions and hesitant to take others?

The simple answer is people tend to take the path of least resistance unless or until they find something they want bad enough to take a detour. Then they decide whether or not it’s worth it.

This goes for everything from taking a new route to work to changing beer brands to switching from a PC to a Mac. (The last of which I am struggling through right now for the second time).
The point is there’s quite a lot of psychology at play in the minds of visitors on your website. If you understand the basics, it can help you structure calls-to-action that result in more people taking them.

I’m not a psychologist, but students of marketing and persuasion – of which I’m a lifelong member – tend to be exposed to plenty of anecdotal and scientific evidence that indicates there are several factors that strongly affect whether or not someone takes action.

Happy New Year!

This month I’m going to focus on the very best way I know of to increase what you get from your marketing investment. That is to turn more of your website visitors into interested prospects and customers.

If you think about, this just makes sense. You already have these people coming to your website. Although some of them undoubtedly got there by mistake, many of them are actually potential customers. Why then are these people so often ignored? Why do marketers continue to spend money driving traffic to a website without worrying about what happens once visitors reach the site?

Let’s put a stop to that and get you more new business from your existing investment.

I'll tell you about some experiments we've run that could easily improve your conversion efficiency, how to set up those experiments using Google Website Optimizer and – in this article – how to get started.

I’m often asked about how to drive more traffic to a website, so I created this overview of some of the tactics software marketers can use to increase the traffic (or leads) going to their websites. You could make a pretty good argument that virtually any marketing tactic can be used to create traffic. But, since I’m an internet marketer, I’m going to focus on tactics that drive traffic by increasing your online visibility.

This is an overview. If you’d like to see a more detailed discussion on any of these tactics, just let me know in a comment. This is also pretty basic info so I apologize if I bore you, but you might find a quick review of the options helpful.

Pay-Per-Click Advertising (PPC)

I start with this tactic because it’s my favorite. It’s fast; it’s effective; and you actually get what you pay for.
When someone types a keyword into a search engine, they get two types of listings. One type is a paid – or sponsored – listing (usually appearing at the top of the page and along the right-hand side). These listing are actually little ads, and each time you click on one of these the advertiser pays a free. Thus the term “pay-per-click advertising”.

Clicks 'n Conversions has just published a great new eBook called Maximizing Return on Reliability - How to increase profits from current website traffic.

It contains a six-step process for maximizing conversions. I invite you to visit us and download a free copy: Maximizing Return on Reliability.

Susan

Clicks 'n Conversions