Verb Marketing founder Dean Currall has spent the last five years grafting to build up a business which has generated over £25m in extra sales for his clients. But he has witnessed first hand why mental illness is steadily rising in the workplace at the hand of shockingly poor management.
He believes that the best managers create a nurturing environment, not a blame culture. However the definition of success is still somewhat warped when you look at deemed role models placed on their egotistical pedestals in programmes such as The Apprentice or Dragons Den. This culture of using blame and humiliation to foster an impression of success falls far short of creating an environment of value and collaboration.
Dean notes that recruitment drives for people with the correct skills for senior positions have revealed that many of them are situated in Manchester. Having an infrastructure which facilitates the development to bigger and better things, higher salaries, and a more cohesive plan by local government to actually support businesses clearly makes a difference in attracting key players.
The fallout of this, is an abundance of over-achievers in Liverpool where people lacking the skills to manage and motivate are being promoted out of necessity. With the focus also being on bottom-line figures, this combo is taking its toll.
With a “we pay you so make it happen” attitude so prevalent, the obsession with the bottom line has removed the two-way element that is needed to give a project any hope of being successful.
Dean has been running Verb for five years and, over that time, has helped their clients generate around £25m in additional sales revenue but he’s quick to point out that the biggest successes were due to clients being open-minded and receptive.
One such company was Swan – a British company which is owned and developed by original Swan employees. They are passionate about the brand’s heritage and are one of the best-known UK based makers of kitchen appliances. Swan were open-minded about their ideas from the outset and in just a couple of months of working with Verb Marketing, had already started to see a significant rise in their sales conversion rate.
He can’t emphasise strongly enough that there is no value in increasing the hits to your website if you don’t have reliable systems in place to convert them into sales. Dean shared that Swan understood this and those kinds of working relationships are a joy. They understood there were things that they needed to change internally to make this process more lucrative.
At the opposite end of the scale, he shared a bad-experience he’d had whilst working with a business where the managers were already very proud of the number of daily enquiries they received.
“They couldn’t wait to tell me and it was a lot, about 200 calls a day and had brought me in to a meeting to let me know there was nothing I could bring to the table they hadn’t already done”
Just to demonstrate the difference in approach, this is how the conversation went:
Company: So we have 200 calls a day, most of them come through Google as our presence is really good, we’ve tried Facebook marketing, email marketing, and nothing else works so fi you were to work for us, what would actually bring to the table?
Dean: The phone’s ringing again, it hasn’t stopped since I got here.
Company: Yes, it rings constantly.
Dean: No, I mean is no one going to answer it, it might be a client?
Company: Oh, yes, someone will probably pick it up soon.
Dean: OKaaay. So, how many calls a day do you get?
Company: 200-300 it’s hard to tell, which is why we don’t need more leads it won’t work for us.
Dean: That’s great, so what’s your conversion rate from those calls?
Company: (blank looks) Uh! We don’t know.
Cue tumbleweed.
Dean: How do you manage your calls?
Their ‘system’ was that a staff member would take a call, record the details on a Post-it Note, which would then join all the other Post-it Notes around the place. The crazy thing is that this chaos had come from the top.
After working together for a short while and putting a system into place to efficiently deal with all of the prospective clients, their conversion rate rocketed to 5% – a tenfold increase. After transforming their business in just 3 months, and adding £420,000 in additional sales, they were let go.
‘Dean thanks but you’ve made us too successful and you’ve created problems for us, we can’t cope with the increase in business, we’re now too busy’. And they sacked me.
You can read more about how the highs and lows of Dean’s experience have shaped his opinions here.
And that’s coming from someone who knows how to work with people. It takes time and investment to grow a business, but your values and ethos need to underpin every part of your business from how you answer your calls through to how the managers make key decisions.
Having affordable office space without the financial burden of long term contracts could free up some working capital to invest in your training programmes. When your staff feel valued and can see you’re invested in their progress, this directly impacts on your bottom line through staff retention and commitment.
If you’re looking for high quality serviced office space in Central Liverpool, get in touch and we’ll happily talk you through your immediate and mid term options to help your business grow.