November 2020 Product Newsletter

Topic of the Month: Ecommerce & Shopify Integration

The ecommerce industry is booming. Online shopping has been trending upward for years, but the pandemic has caused these trend lines to spike exponentially. For example, the number of Shopify merchants have tripled since the COVID-19 outbreak. 

If you’ve recently launched a new ecommerce site to generate sales, you’re just barely scratching the surface with the opportunity in this space. To take your ecommerce business to the next level, you need an ecommerce mobile app.

BuildFire seamlessly integrates with Shopify. So driving mobile sales with our platform is a breeze for anyone.

Don’t think you need an app for your online store? Think again. Check out this data-driven article that explains why every ecommerce site MUST HAVE a mobile app.

COVID-19 has forced businesses to adapt or die. Launching an ecommerce site is a step in the right direction, but an app will take you to new heights. 

November App Spotlight: Courses and Educational Apps

Our team has seen a huge demand for educational apps over the last month. Again, this is directly tied to the pandemic. 

So many classes across all education levels have gone virtual. Some specific verticals that we’ve seen utilizing mobile apps for online learning include:

  • Cosmetology Courses
  • Work Seminars and Webinars
  • Life Coaching
  • Cooking Classes

Businesses and educational institutions need a way to get learning materials into the hands of users. This can be anything from video lessons to Zoom meetings. 

In addition to the simple way of displaying and organizing educational content, BuildFire also makes it easy to monetize courses with in-app purchases or subscriptions. You can set up a paywall, so users are required to purchase your learning materials.

We recommend the following plugins for educational apps:

  • Video Note Taker
  • Drip Content (for new courses every day or week)
  • User Created Checklists
  • Free Text Questionnaire
  • YouTube and Vimeo

Lots of businesses already have a database of users. You can seamlessly grant access to your current database by using our Zapier integration or SSO to translate purchases. 

Product Updates and Enhancements

Our developers and engineers have had a busy month. With the new iOS 14 release, we had to perform all of the compatibility checks for the platform, apps, and plugins. We also addressed some minor bug fixes and made enhancements to the following 14 marketplace plugins:

  • Free Text Questionnaire
  • Review and Approve
  • Loyalty 
  • Coupon and Deals
  • Folder 1.0
  • Media Center Manual
  • Image Carousel
  • Journal 
  • Home Page Grid Layout
  • Media Center RSS
  • Outline Action Item Folder
  • Dynamic List
  • People 
  • Questionnaire

Another noteworthy enhancement was made to the Image Previewer. Some users reported that they were unable to zoom on PWAs with this feature. We made a quick fix, so now you can zoom without any problems. 

Two new premium templates were released last month. We also have four brand new features that are currently in the works (so keep an eye out for next month’s newsletter for details).

Bluetooth and iBeacon Integration

We’re excited to announce the addition of Bluetooth and iBeacon to the BuildFire SDK. 

This really opens up the capabilities for IoT and smart devices. These integrations will allow us to create apps that interact with hardware and firmware in real life (use apps to control things in the physical world). 

There are tons of potential use cases here. Some examples include fitness, people tracking, device control, and so much more. 

I’m sure we’ll be keeping you updated with more on this subject as we start building more apps that leverage these integrations. So stay tuned to upcoming newsletters. 

Places 2.0 Enhancements

Places 2.0 got some seriously cool upgrades. Here’s a quick run down of everything we’ve done : 

  • Create a private chat directly with an individual business or location 
  • Add CSV Merge
  • Added import CSV loading bar
  • Added import CSV error log
  • Add Language Tab for configurability of buttons and wording  
  • Allow admin to turn on/ of “Get Directions” and “Contact Us” button

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Search Bar for the Control Panel to help navigate to your plugins faster 

We have introduced a search bar for the Control Panel! You can search directly for your plugins by name, search by all the instances of a new plugin type, and even add new plugins directly from the search bar without having to navigate to the Marketplace.

It will even remember the last three plugins that you were working on for quicker navigation!

BuildFire Plus

BuildFire Plus is our newest service offering. It’s something we’ve been working on for a long time, and I’m super excited about its value to our clients.

This is perfect for anyone that is looking for a strategic partner in an app development project.

The service includes white-glove services that go above and beyond basic consultancy and development. Some of the noteworthy highlights of this service include:

  • Competitive analysis
  • Wireframes, design, and prototyping
  • App strategy sessions
  • User engagement reports
  • App store performance reports
  • Content updates

Here at BuildFire, we strive to be more than just a development platform. We consider ourselves a partner in your success. Click here to learn more about BuildFire Plus.

BuildFire webinars and new weekly trainings and refreshers

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We are excited to announce that we have launched weekly Q&A training workshops! Monday through Wednesday we’ll have in-depth trainings on the Control Panel, what features you get with your subscription, publishing. 

We also have dedicated trainings and refreshers each week for our White Label partners.

Check out the replays of our most recent webinars:

  • How to set-up In-app Purchases and In-app Subscriptions
  • How to use Zapier to make your app more powerful and automate tasks! 

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Check out all of our past webinars →  

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FAQs of the Month

Any time our customer success team gets lots of similar questions, we want to provide resources with solutions. 

The past month we fielded a significant amount of inquiries related to in-app purchases. So I want to quickly highlight our top support resources related to those questions:

These self-help guides will walk you through everything you need to know about in-app purchases. As always, feel free to reach out to us if you still have questions or need assistance (about in-app purchases or any topic).

How to Attract New Clients to Your Agency

Agencies should always be actively trying to onboard new clients. Failure to do so can have long-term repercussions for your business.

Even if you’re doing well right now, your contracts will eventually expire—and there’s no guarantee that your existing clients will renew. So whether you’re running a startup or own a well-established firm, new customer acquisition strategies for agencies should always be a top priority. 

Throughout my career, I’ve worked closely with dozens of agencies of all shapes and sizes. These experiences have taught me what it takes to have success in this space. 

I’ll share some of the top marketing strategies, tips, and best practices for onboarding new agency clients. Here’s what you need to do.

Cold Email Outreach

With so many new and exciting marketing strategies out there, it can be easy for agencies to overlook the basics. But don’t underestimate the power of email. 

Cold email outreach is one of my favorite ways to acquire customers, especially if you want to attract new mobile app clients. For starters, cold email outreach is cheap. Aside from the email software you’re using, the only cost you’ll incur is your time. 

In addition to the sky-high ROI associated with email marketing, a whopping 80% of prospects say they prefer email as the first-contact method. 

As you can see from the graph, this ranks first above every other option. It’s 31% higher than cold calling, which ranks second on this list. 

While cold email outreach can be highly effective, it only works well if you put in the time and effort. This involves things like researching who to contact, testing different subject lines, and following-up at the right time with the perfect message. 

Need help with this strategy?

When you sign up for BuildFire’s mobile app reseller program, we’ll send you our cold email outreach playbook. This resource has 25 real strategies that you can follow. All of these sequences are designed for attracting new mobile app clients. You can use this guide as a template, essentially copying and pasting the messages (and filling in your agency’s information).

Provide Additional Services

Being a one-trick pony limits your potential pool of prospects. The best agencies offer a wide range of services, which makes their firm more appealing to a greater number of people. 

For example, let’s say your agency only provides website development and design services. You’re excluding prospects that need help in other areas. Other examples of services you could add are:

  • Content creation
  • Video production
  • Inbound marketing services
  • Mobile app development
  • Branding
  • Strategic planning
  • SEO (search engine optimization) services
  • ASO (app store optimization) services
  • Influencer marketing
  • Mobile app marketing
  • User acquisition

The list goes on and on. I’m not saying you need to provide every service under the sun. There’s a fine line between quantity and quality. Don’t spread yourself too thin and offer services in areas that aren’t in your wheelhouse. 

If you’re not an expert in certain areas, adding new members to your team who specialize in other categories will be the best way to expand. As a result, this will definitely make your agency more appealing to a wider target audience of prospective clients. 

For those of you who aren’t ready to hire new full-time employees, build relationships with contractors. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say you want to offer content creation. Rather than hiring someone in-house to complete these tasks for your clients, you could always contract out blogs, ebooks, landing page copy, or other content to a freelance blogger or independent contractor. 

Another benefit of new services is client retention. In addition to attracting new clients to your agency, these extra services will be appealing to your current clientele. So you can upsell them and extend those contracts. 

The best agencies always keep their finger on the pulse. They follow relevant news across a wide range of industries that will ultimately help their current customers and prospects alike. 

How can you possibly onboard new clients if you’re not fully aware of what’s going on in different industries? 

For example, let’s say you work with businesses that sell physical or digital products. You should be learning and researching more information about consumer behind habits. In your research, you’d likely discover how mobile commerce is trending upward.

This type of information is vital for such a wide range of businesses. Companies that are currently selling online can improve conversion rates by developing a mobile application. Even brick-and-mortar retailers can boost sales by optimizing their business for mobile devices.

As an agency, this knowledge will make your organization so much more appealing to clients. You can blow prospects away with your email outreach, discovery calls, and initial consultations by sharing your knowledge.

For those of you who want to primarily focus on attracting new mobile app clients, check out the latest mobile app development trends here

Be a Problem Solver

A huge mistake I see agencies make every day is that they try and invent new problems for prospects. This is largely due to the lack of proper research.

If you’re trying to reach every prospect with the same pitch, your level of success will be extremely low. There needs to be that extra level of personalization to take your client pitches to the next level. (Review our guide on how to pitch a mobile app to your clients).

Stay away from basic pitches like “get more traffic” or “drive more app downloads.” Those are too generic and don’t actually solve problems. Here’s how you can flip those and turn them into a problem-solving pitch.

Let’s say a prospect already has a mobile app for their business. You might discover that their biggest competitors rank higher than them in app stores for certain keywords—that’s a problem. 

The solution? ASO (app store optimization). You can pitch these services to help your clients get more app users on iOS and Android devices. That solves their problem of falling behind in the rankings to competitors. 

But if you’re trying to invent problems that don’t exist based on what’s easiest for your agency, it will be tough to onboard new clients. 

Become a White Label App Reseller

This relates back to one of our earlier talking points about offering new services. It also ties into following the latest trends (mobile app development trends are booming).

Virtually every business has the need for a mobile app. But in today’s day and age, you don’t need to be an app developer to offer app development services to your clients. Instead, just become a reseller of existing software.

If you’re interested in becoming a reseller, check out BuildFire’s white label services

BuildFire is a web-based app development platform. Anyone can use it to create a mobile app from scratch—no coding or development experience required. 

The entire platform can be branded for your agency. You’ll have hundreds of customizable options to fit your brand and accommodate your customers’ needs. By leveraging an existing solution like BuildFire, you won’t have to worry about any of the complexities associated with maintaining the apps. You’re just providing the software and functionality to your clients.

As a white label reseller, you’ll be able to manage client apps, clone apps, create new apps, manage configuration levels, and more.

All of this can be handled from your administrative dashboard. 

BuildFire also provides dedicated white label support. So even if you’re not an app development expert, you can essentially become one for your clients. You won’t have to worry about publishing the apps and getting them live on the app stores either—we’ll handle all of this for you. 

Still on the fence? Check out this guide on the top reasons why your agency should become a mobile app reseller

Create Free Resources to Generate Leads

Don’t underestimate the power of free resources. If you can help your prospects with small issues or general advice for free, they’ll come knocking at your door when it’s time to take those strategies to the next level.

I’m referring to resources like ebooks, blogs, tutorials, online courses, kits, podcasts, etc.

For example, let’s say your agency specializes in SEO and content creation. You can write blogs about relevant topics or provide tutorials on installing the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress sites. But those pieces of content can include high-level strategies that the average business won’t be able to complete on their own. 

Technical SEO elements like robots.txt files, dead links, structured data, XML sitemaps, security, and speed aren’t components that the average small business owner will feel comfortable tackling on their own. This gives them an incentive to hire your agency.

Furthermore, people are more willing to work with others who have helped them in the past. Maybe a business owner applied some of the strategies you mentioned in your podcast to help boost sales or retain customers. When that person needs something else down the road, your agency will be a top consideration.

The key to having success with this strategy is finding the balance between selling your services and giving it all away for free. You need to find a happy medium between the two.

Always be Networking

The term “networking” is often misunderstood. It’s not just attending large events with a lanyard around your neck, passing out business cards to everyone you encounter. 

Today, networking can happen from anywhere online. Find out where your target audience is spending time online, and insert yourself into those conversations. Examples include:

  • Q&A websites (like Quora)
  • Online forums (like Reddit)
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook groups

Take advantage of these platforms and social networks, in addition to live events and conferences. 

Here’s an example. Check out this screenshot from a Reddit community for marketing and advertising

There are nearly 300,000 members in this community. People are always posting questions like the one I’ve highlighted above. As an agency owner, it’s super easy for you to be active in this community and reply to questions.

It’s cheaper than attending a conference, and you can network at scale. 

Similar to our previous point, you don’t necessarily want to give everything away for free. But give people enough helpful information so that it answers their question. Avoid being salesly on these types of platforms. Otherwise, it could come across as spam (which is a major turn off for people).

Instead, just make your presence known and try to participate as much as possible wherever you see an appropriate fit. With time and patience, this will help you attract new clients.

Practice What You Preach

There’s an old saying, “never trust a skinny chef,” that some of you might be familiar with. It essentially means that if the chef’s cooking was halfway decent, they’d be eating non-stop and probably put on some weight. 

But this saying can be applied to a wide range of industries, especially in the agency space. Here’s what I mean.

You can’t position yourself as a web design expert if your website is boring and not visually appealing. You can’t be an SEO expert if your own website is slow and doesn’t follow other basic SEO practices. 

Prospects will obviously check you out and do some digging before contracting your services. So make sure your own house is in order before you go out and offer your services to other businesses. 

There are definitely some exceptions to the rule. 

For example, let’s say you’re a social media marketer. Your agency wouldn’t necessarily need a presence on Snapchat or TikTok. You’re not generating B2B leads on those platforms. So while you might be helping B2C clients with social media marketing on those channels, you wouldn’t need to apply those same tactics to your business. 

Build Authority For Your Personal Brand

The principles of branding for physical products can be applied to agency services as well. In short, brands are trusted names within an industry. 

Branding is the reason why Nike can sell sneakers for $150, why Gucci can sell t-shirts for $500, and why Apple can sell iPhones for $1,400. With a well-established brand, your agency can start retaining new clients for $10k to $20k+ per month with ease. 

For example, take a guy like Neil Patel. He’s known as one of the top (if not THE top) digital marketers on the planet. His blog generates millions of visitors, and his YouTube channel has 31+ million views and counting. 

It’s safe to say that Neil has built authority in his space. So his agency, Neil Patel Digital, has an easy time attracting new clients. His brand name alone is enough for prospects to sign on. 

Other examples of people who have built authority in their respective spaces include Gary Vaynerchuk (better known as “Gary Vee) in the digital media industry, Grant Cardone in sales, Ramit Sethi in personal finance. 

This is a long-term process. You won’t become the next Neil Patel or Ramit Sethi overnight. But if you can take steps to build authority with your own brand name, it will be much easier for you to retain agency clients.

Ask For Referrals

If you provide exceptional services, there’s a good chance that your clients will refer you to other organizations. Business owners talk. While they don’t necessarily give their secrets away to competitors, they’re always happy to help friends and family who own businesses in other spaces.

For example, let’s say your agency helped a local dry cleaner build an email list and increase the AOV for existing customers. The owner of that company might refer you to their cousin, who owns a local restaurant. 

Referrals are great when they come unexpectedly. But when was the last time you asked for a referral? Think about it.

According to a recent study, referrals are the number one method for reaching new prospects in the B2B space. 

While it may feel awkward at first, there’s no shame in asking your existing clients for referrals. The vast majority of them will happily do it for you, especially if you’ve made a difference and helped move the needle for their business.

For the ones that don’t, there’s really no downside to asking. It’s not like they’re going to cancel their contract because you politely asked them for a professional favor. At worst, they’ll just ignore the request. 

In addition to referrals, you can ask your best clients to leave reviews and testimonials on your website. All of this will make it easier for you to attract new agency clients. 

Learn to Adapt

I’ve consulted with lots of agencies who had huge success in their respective areas of expertise five or ten years ago. But today, they’re struggling.

One of the biggest factors causing this decline in success is the failure to adapt. 

The same strategies, tactics, and services that worked five years ago might be completely obsolete today. In some instances, even strategies from last year won’t work today. So your agency needs to adapt or die.

That’s why it’s so important to stay educated on market trends (as previously discussed) and offer new services, like mobile app development. That’s where the future is heading, and that’s where you need to position yourself. 

Conclusion

Attracting clients to your agency will always be an ongoing process. 

There’s no single strategy that will become your magic wand for signing prospects. One marketing campaign won’t be enough to move the needle. You’ll need to apply several tactics cumulatively to position yourself as an attractive agency within your niche. 

If you’re having trouble with signing new clients, follow the tips and best practices that I’ve outlined in this guide.

For those of you who are interested in attracting new mobile clients to your agency with app development services, contact our team here at BuildFire to learn more about our reseller program. 

How to Achieve Your Business Goals

We all set goals for ourselves and for our businesses. However, too few of us actually achieve those goals, and it’s not for lack of trying—we’re just not following the right blueprint. 

Just like everyone else, earlier in my career, I suffered from not achieving my goals. 

This goes for personal goals, business goals, and goals on a project basis; I just wasn’t making it happen. After years of struggling and trying different methods, I finally found what worked. 

Part of my success came from experimentation, but a lot of it was also from learning through other people’s experiences. I fully appreciated and leveraged all of the information that’s available on the Internet and through reading books. 

One of the books I read was written by Peter Drucker. He identified a concept called “SMART” objectives, which is something that we’ll define in greater detail later on. I’ll also teach you how to implement SMART objectives and get your team aligned with your goals. 

Let’s dive in!
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5 Tips and Best Practices to Achieve Your Business Goals

As previously mentioned, I went through a ton of trial and error when it came to achieving my goals. I can finally say that I’ve discovered a proven method for success.

I’ve broken down my methodology into five simple steps that you can follow to have success and achieve your goals as well. 

Goal setting is crucial for startups, small businesses, large organizations, and everything in between. The goal-setting process is more than just writing a business plan. Here’s what you need to do:

#1 — Clearly Identify Your Goals and Objectives

This is a common mistake that I see on a daily basis. The first thing you need to do is identify your goals and objectives—remove any confusion between the two.

Goals are the outcomes that you want. Objectives are the steps you must take to achieve those outcomes.

It’s extremely important that you’re able to identify a good goal. This may sound obvious, but trust me, not all goals are good ones. Goals must have your full attention and focus so you can really think through what a proper goal is for your business.

It’s easy to identify a bad goal because they sound something along the lines of “make more money” or “become the next Facebook” or “be on the cover of Forbes.” These are goals that everyone wants and it sort of goes without saying.

But none of these are really the actual goal of your business. 

Ask yourself, why is your company different than others? Don’t try and identify a goal through monetary reasoning, but more for the purpose your business serves. 

For example, a good goal would be something like “become the number one choice for customers in my market sector.” Now the idea is specific to a certain market.

If you’re struggling to identify the mission, vision, and goal of your company, I highly recommend that you go watch Simon Sinek’s TED Talk about how great leaders inspire action. 

Sinek wrote a book titled “Start With Why,” and he does an excellent job explaining that concept during this video. The book is also worth reading, but the video is a faster way to grasp this idea. 

Do yourself a favor and actually watch it to fully understand what he’s saying here. It’s a beautiful resource for understanding the soul of your company and why your company exists. I really learned a ton of useful information from this, and it inspired me to take the proper steps to achieve success.

Let’s get back to the example I used earlier about becoming the number one choice for your customer satisfaction in a specific market sector. 

What steps do you need to take in order to achieve this strategic goal? Those will be your objectives. Examples could include:

  • Increase brand trust
  • Provide 24 hour support to your customer base
  • Reduce bug debt by 50%

All of these will put you on track to ultimately reach your clearly defined goals. Now you’ve separated the difference between a goal and an objective. 

Company goals for business success must start with an action plan. 

#2 — Make Sure Your Objectives Are SMART

As I mentioned earlier, SMART objectives were defined in a book by Peter Drucker. SMART is an acronym that stands for:

  • Specific: Outline a clear statement that defines what is required.
  • Measurable: A clear unit of measurement (preferably through numerical terms) that can identify progress and completion of the objective.
  • Achievable: Objectives should be challenging yet achievable. You need to be happy with the outcome, but your team must be willing to commit. 
  • Realistic: Managers should focus on outcomes and let the team focus on the initiatives to achieve those outcomes. 
  • Timely: Set a specific date of achievement that must be agreed upon and met. 

The reason why goals must be specific is because you’ll have no other way of knowing if you’ve actually achieved them or not. 

They must also be measurable, so it’s not something that’s infinite. For example, “keep customers happy” isn’t measurable. What does happy mean? “Make product better” doesn’t work either. What is better? How much is better? It can’t be measured.

It’s crucial that you allow your team to deal with the initiatives. Otherwise, the methods that we impose as managers might not be realistic, which means they can’t be achieved on time. This brings me to our last step—timely. Always set deadlines for everything so your team knows when objectives must be completed by.  

Implementing SMART objectives to achieve your goal is the best way to stay on track without losing sight of the end results. 

#3 — Identify Clear KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)

Let’s quickly recap. We’re going to focus ourselves on the objectives and let our team focus on the initiatives to achieve those objectives. To do this properly, we need to make sure that we have pre-defined measurements to track everything—preferably in numerical terms.  

This allows us to measure success and increase transparency, so we’ll know if we’re going to hit our goal or not. Better yet, we’ll know if we’re on track to hit our goals.

Here’s what I mean. Let’s refer back to an objective that I used as an example earlier—reduce our bug log by 50%. For simplicity’s sake, let’s say we have 100 bugs. 50% of that is 50 bugs. We want to achieve this objective in one month. (I know I’m throwing out lots of numbers, but stay with me).

If we get to the midway point of the month and only one-third of the bugs have been fixed, we immediately know that we’re not on track to finish on time. 

So this gives you the ability to track your progress and forecast whether or not you’ll hit those goals. You can always find ways to adjust accordingly to meet your deadlines and objectives. 

CHALLENGE: What was your previous goal? What has your new goal become? Why does your small business exist? How did you redefine your mission, vision, and goal from something like “I want to make more money” to “become a leader in my industry” based on what we’ve covered so far? 

I’m really interested in knowing how you made that change so we can all benefit from each other. So let me know in the comments section, and we can have a discussion. 

#4 — Give Your Team Ownership and Autonomy

If we’re going to delegate initiatives to our team, they need to make their own decisions to live and die by. Micromanaging is not effective, and sometimes, we as managers will get in their way. 

By increasing the level of autonomy with your staff, you’ll automatically increase their level of engagement. 

If you don’t empower your team, then you’ll restrict their potential and ultimately hinder the path to completing objectives.

In short, let everyone do their jobs the best way that they know how to. You must be able to trust your team if you want to scale your company and experience business growth.

Additionally, here’s another reason why you should avoid micromanagement. If things don’t go well, the excuse from your staff will always become, “I did what you told me to do.”

So make sure your team is autonomous and owns their initiatives. People can own multiple initiatives; that’s fine too. But they need to own something, and the success of their engagement will be tied directly to their level of ownership.

Trust your team to deliver.

If they don’t deliver, that’s another subject altogether. But give them the opportunity to succeed. 

#5 — Keep Your Team Accountable

For this to work effectively, your team must be held accountable and responsible for their role in achieving objectives. 

Let’s rewind for a minute quickly. We’ve already identified a true goal and the objectives required to achieve that goal. Now we’ve assigned our team the clear KPIs for SMART objectives that they must use to focus on their own initiatives. So the final step is holding them accountable. 

Holding your team accountable starts with something as simple as circling a date on a calendar. Invite all of your stakeholders to a meeting at the end of the pre-assigned date. Here are some helpful tips for fostering a culture of accountability:

Holding a meeting with your stakeholders gives everyone an opportunity to report on their status and check in with their objectives. This will be the time when you’ll figure out if everything has been achieved or not.

All of your managers will need to attend this meeting and report amongst each other. This also creates a friendly competition between your managers to see who achieved their goals and who did not. 

PRO TIP: If you want a B, ask for an A. So even if your team falls a bit short, you’re still getting a passing grade. But if you ask for a C, your team will most likely come back with failure. 

When you hold this meeting, make sure you do a retrospective. Understand the objectives that were met and the adjectives that weren’t met. More importantly, understand the why behind both. 

What did we do well? What did we do poorly? How can we adjust?

Then hammer own your next set of objectives for the upcoming month, quarter, year, etc. Make sure all of this is determined based on the learnings you had from the first time around, which will make it easier for you to trend toward success. 

Conclusion

Nobody wants to fall short of their goals. But in order to achieve success in a business environment, you need to follow the playbook that’s been outlined by leaders who came before you.

I wish that I had this resource when I first started out. It would have saved me so much time, money, and headaches. But I’m still grateful that I found it when I did, as I’ve been able to accomplish countless goals since then. 

Let’s quickly recap. 

First, you need to define your goals and distinguish them from your objectives. Then, make sure you have SMART goals and set KPIs to track your progress. Give your team autonomy, and hold them accountable. 

That’s it! This works for long-term goals and short-term goals alike. 

I really hope that this guide helps you achieve your goals. Keep it close by so you can continually refer back to it in the future. Let’s build great things together!

How to Manage Your Remote Teams

I’ve been dealing with remote teams for over 20 years.

Throughout this time, I have been fine-tuning my process to make sure I can manage remote teams across the globe in different time zones and countries. I’ve read books on this topic, watched many videos, and experimented with different strategies to learn what works and what doesn’t.

If you’re having problems or concerns about managing a remote team, you’ve come to the right place. I know these problems. I’ve lived these problems. And I’ve solved these problems.

With teams going remotely today, more than ever before, I thought this would be an appropriate time to share my tips, tricks, and best practices for remote team management.

Challenges Associated With Remote Work

Some of you may be new to remote management, while others have managed remote teams in the past but didn’t have much success. Let me take a moment to quickly identify some of the problems and worries you might be feeling.

Is your team actually working? Are they working from home? Do they have family members and other distractions?

  • Transparency — What is my team working on? How long does it take to finish a task?
  • Availability — Will they answer when I call? If they don’t, are they out exploring nature?
  • Misaligned Goals and Priorities — Are team members focusing on what I need them to focus on? Are they really working effectively?

These are all valid concerns. But in reality, these should be concerns whether your team is remote or not. If they only become concerns when you move to remote management, it means you have a flaw in your process.

Vulnerabilities in your process are self-corrected by the environment. Here’s what I mean:

In a face-to-face office environment, how do you know if one of your employees is working? You can take a peek over at their desk. If they’re at the desk, you assume they’re working. How do you know what they’re working on? Just peek over their shoulder and see the screen.

But as we all know, just because someone is sitting at their desk with some code or a spreadsheet on their screen, it doesn’t really mean that they are actually working. So it’s unfair to say that in-person management will automatically correct your concerns associated with remote employees—that’s simply not the case.

You need to figure out a process that works for your organization, whether your team is remote or not.

It Starts at the Top (With You)

In addition to the concerns you might have, take a moment to figure out the challenges your team might be facing. According to a recent survey, here are the biggest struggles of working remotely.

I get asked all of the time, “how do you manage remote teams that are thousands of miles away and make sure that they are consistently productive?” If you’ve read my blogs and watched my videos, you know that I prefer a mixture of local and remote resources. My teams are distributed on something called “the golden ratio.”

But not all of us have the luxury of employing local and remote resources. So we need to figure out a process that works for both—and it all starts with you.

Here’s some good news. If you’re reading this guide, it means you’ve already identified that this is a worthwhile cause and problem that must be addressed. Seeking information is the first step, so kudos to you.

What needs to change in your process?

Whatever that answer might be, you need to be disciplined about it. Own that initiative. Make sure it’s implemented throughout your entire organization.

It’s your job to get all managers and team members at all levels to buy-in to your new process.

Being disciplined could be as simple as making sure all meetings start on time and end on time. I can’t tell you how many companies I’ve dealt with that have a systematic problem where every meeting is late, causing all other meetings to be late, and nobody complains. It becomes part of the company culture, and it’s super frustrating.

Even small discipline levels like starting and ending meetings on time will go a long way for remote teams. If you can’t manage this properly, your problems will snowball at a higher level.

Communication

I know that this is a generic topic that everyone talks about, but it’s extremely important.

Great communication is measured by quality, not quantity. Overcommunication is a huge problem, but we’ll discuss that in greater detail shortly.

Let’s refer back to traditional office environments. Why do you think open concepts in workspaces have become so popular lately?

These floorplans encourage communication.

Even if you’re on your headphones all day and get up to grab a coffee or drink from the water cooler, you might hear your colleagues talking about something as you move past them on a shared desk. These subjects may or may not pertain to you now, but they’ll inevitably come back to you.

So all of this information gets absorbed as a community.

But you lose this concept when your team goes remote. So how do you compensate?

Hold all-hands meetings. This is a best practice for managing both local and remote teams alike. And to be clear, when I say all hands, I mean all hands on deck. Bring everyone into the team meeting. All levels of management, all resources, leaders, the CEO, and c-suite should all be attending.

What is the goal and vision of your company? What are the current objectives? How are these changing?

By discussing these at an all-hands meeting, everyone will understand what needs to happen. All departments will contribute and explain how they are striving to reach those goals and objectives. This will get your entire team rowing in the same direction to get where the whole group needs to be.

This helps your team understand the why of what they’re doing, and not just the what.

From time to time, you need to make sure that everyone is aligned and knows the north star. For remote meetings, these check-ins can happen over any digital communication method, like Google Hangouts, Slack, Skype, Zoom, or whatever communication tools you’re using.

I encourage your entire team to put an updated picture of their face on their profiles. This helps everyone look at each other as a real person. Avoid screen names; use your real name on everything. This helps everyone understand that they are real people, not just company resources.

Turn on your camera during video calls and video conferencing. Make sure your team can see you. Encourage them to turn on their cameras as well.

There is something called the 7-38-55 rule, created by Dr. Albert Mehrabian.

 

The model suggests that just 7% of communication is the words you use, and 38% is your tone. But a whopping 55% of communication is based on body language.

Whether you agree with those exact numbers or not, it’s clear that nonverbal cues are a huge part of effective communication. By turning on the cameras, everyone can see each other and fully understand these nonverbal cues.

This also forces people to get dressed up and presentable so they can be on camera. Some remote workers can feel depressed and stay in their pajamas all day. But to keep morale high, being camera-ready will make your remote team take a shower, get dressed, and take care of themselves.

The camera can ultimately become a virtual portal into the workplace.

Do NOT Overcommunicate

Overcommunication can be just as bad as no communication at all.

I’m referring to things like meetings that go on for too long, meetings that happen too frequently, excessive chatter on messaging channels, etc.

If a meeting can take 30 minutes, don’t stretch it to an hour. Otherwise, you’ll have participants zoning out and not paying attention. If someone doesn’t need to be at a meeting, don’t force them to be there.

Here’s a study that shows what people are really doing during conference calls.

In some companies I’ve worked with, I implement a mute hour throughout the day. Nobody is allowed to get on a chat channel unless it’s extremely urgent. This could be an hour, two hours, four hours, or whatever you decide per day.

I’ve even implemented policies like “no meeting Wednesdays,” where nobody can schedule meetings on a particular day of the week.

Both of these policies help people go into a deep state of work. If you have one full day without any meetings, that’s 20% of the week where everyone can dedicate to complete focus without distractions.

Process, Process, Process

I can’t emphasize this enough. You must have a process that encourages productivity, transparency, and accountability.

How do you know if your system and process are good or not? Simple—by the results.

Pick a process that works for you; you don’t work for the process. That’s how you vet out these mechanisms to see if they’re aiding your company or hindering you.

Personally, I recommend agile project management. It’s a common management methodology for software development teams.

This project management framework is meant to encourage productivity, transparency, and accountability. But it gives you the ability to stay agile and change directions, initiatives, and priorities on the fly.

I have a video on the Agile SCRUM methodology that you can check out for more details on this framework.

As with any new process that’s implemented in a business, it’s always important to ease in. Give yourself time so everyone can adjust.

The new process should include a daily standup meeting. Some people call them huddles, daily syncs, or daily check-ins (it doesn’t matter what you call it). But it happens every day, and it’s supposed to be really short—so short that people don’t feel the need to sit (hence the name).

Your team gets together, and everyone spends a couple of minutes explaining what they did yesterday and what they plan on doing today. This is an opportunity for people to express areas where they need help or assistance.

Now let’s circle back to one of our earlier talking points—change starts with you.

Make sure you’re disciplined enough to ensure this meeting is actually held every day. If you’re not around, make sure someone is doing it, like a project manager.

If the meeting is supposed to be at 9 AM, that’s 9 AM sharp—not 9:05 or 9:10.

Think of it like working out. The hardest part of working out is making it to the gym. So how do you make sure these meetings happen daily?

  • Standardize
  • Ritualize
  • Optimize

If you do a daily standup meeting every day for weeks and months, it will eventually become muscle memory. Even if you’re on vacation or get sick, the meeting will still happen because it’s a daily ritual for your team.

Don’t try to fix everything on day one, or it will fall apart. Back to my gym analogy. If you try to lift too much weight on your first day, you’ll never be able to get where you want to go. Instead, you can start to optimize your process over time.

Autonomy and Accountability For Remote Work

The best remote teams are autonomous and are held accountable for their work.

When you give your team autonomy, it means that every single member has to take ownership for a particular task. They can complete it by themselves.

If you’re constantly looking over their shoulder and micromanaging, it becomes a major problem. Your team will get disconnected, and if things go wrong, they’ll give you an excuse like, “I just did what you told me to do.”

Any time you hear those words, it’s a big red flag and sign that you’re micromanaging too much.

Remote teams should be autonomous. Let them handle takes and take responsibility. Allow them to own those tasks and take pride in their work.

To hold them accountable, make sure you give them clear and measurable SMART objectives.

Make sure your requests are extremely clear. What does success look like? When is it expected? At the end of this deadline, it’s up to you to make sure your team is held accountable.

Here’s an example. Let’s say a developer is working with a product team to output a new feature that will boost sales. Once that feature is out, you must gather analytics to see if it actually increased sales or not.

Everyone needs to be held accountable for the decisions that are made.

Not so much for fear of repercussions. But more so you can know what worked well (and do more of that) and what didn’t work well (so you can do less of it). Ultimately, you can adjust accordingly so everyone gets better.

Tell the team that you win together, and lose together.

When team members find someone who is the weakest link that month, they can go and help that person. You might be the weakest link one month, but the next weak it could be me, and I’ll need your help. That’s how you build teamwork while managing remote employees.

Collaborative efforts when everyone has the autonomy to do their parts are crucial for managing successful remote teams.

Coaching and Nurturing

This is another important aspect for managing any team. But more often than not, you might forget about this (I know I’m guilty of forgetting too).

Every employee that I have (remote or not) has a very clear definition of their responsibilities.

You might ask yourself, “Shouldn’t it be obvious what a developer should do? Or a project manager? Or a designer?”

Grab any employee that isn’t doing well and ask them the definition of their job. Ask them about their responsibilities. See if their answer matches yours—it probably doesn’t.

Have a meeting and clearly explain what you expect from that employee. Give them five clear and measurable metrics that will allow them to succeed. Write them down and explain them in detail. Then on a frequent basis, score your employees on those metrics and provide feedback.

So many employees are surprised when they are let go because they weren’t given enough feedback to know they were doing poorly. They think they’re doing a good job, but they’re not—because nobody told them.

If you fire an employee and they are surprised, it’s a flaw in the management system.

Management should be able to explain problems BEFORE it’s too late. Tell them what they’re doing well, what they’re not doing well, and clearly identify your expectations. You still need to do this with remote teams to hold them accountable.

Acknowledge your team for a job well done. More than 60% of employees say that management does not recognize their achievements.

 

A simple “thank you” can go a long way.

When you recognize good work, it actually makes people more productive. In fact, 69% of employees say that they would work harder if they felt more appreciated. Another study suggests that 37% of employees consider recognition to be the most important part of management success. This ranked first on the list of responses.

Don’t be afraid to recognize team members amongst their peers or in front of the entire organization for a job well done.

Give them a shout out during the all-hands meetings (that we discussed earlier). Have an MVP, employee of the month, or whatever award works best for your company culture.

There are so many unsung heroes in tech. For example, there are countless QAs out there that make sure the products are great, but never get recognized for it.

Show your team that you understand how valuable they are. Say thank you, and give kudos on good work.

Conclusion

Remote working has become the new normal. Managers must be able to adapt accordingly to successfully manage remote teams.

At its core, remote management will encompass many of the same practices and management styles you use to manage a traditional office environment. You just need to apply those same strategies to your remote environment.

Even if it’s your first time working with a distributed team, you can still have success using my methodology for remote team members.

Trust me; as someone who has tried seemingly every remote management tactic under the sun, the tips and best practices described above actually work.

I hope this guide was helpful and gave you clear and logical steps for managing remote teams. Good luck!