You are keen for a change, and have found an Inbound Marketing course that will take you and your team to the next level, and by association improve the business. You are all in and want nothing more than to learn these new inbound skills ASAP and start implementing them in the organisation. But there is just one problem – in fact, one ginormous hurdle – you have to get permission from your boss.
Convincing the big cheese of the office to invest some hard cash in your professional development often seems like an impossible task, and you are starting to believe that you would genuinely have a better chance of making it to the winning a gold medal…. At the Olympics…. For synchronised swimming.
But don’t reach for the goggles just yet! We have the top tips to get you through the pitch with your team leader and secure your slot on that training course.
Firstly, you have to understand that you are fighting a losing battle. No CEO, CFO or manager wants to throw money at something they either don’t understand or don’t see the instant dollar bill return. For this reason you need to approach your pitch in a very statistical manner – demonstrating clearly and professionally that this is a great opportunity for the business and that it will definitely reap a solid return on investment.
Here are a few stats to get your boss warmed up:
Secondly, CEOs, CFOs and business owners all have a tendency to despise marketing. Just mention the term ‘marketing’ and you will see the colour fade from their face. But why is there such hatred for such a wonderful thing? Well, it is mainly because these guys deal with numbers. They love to measure data, and marketing in its original outbound sense, has very little measureable qualities – other than that painful final bill. Luckily, inbound is all about the analytics – recording, collecting and building methodology around data collection, and the best thing about it is that you can directly see how many dollars and time you have put in to generate a lead or gain a customer. Once you convince your boss that inbound is a measureable, data saturated, cost-effective way to bring in revenue, they are likely to become your biggest supporter!
However, if your boss isn’t freaked out by marketing, but is in fact a die-hard fan of traditional outbound marketing, he or she may be suspicious of this new fandangled way of doing things. Blogging? You’re not entirely sure that they know what that is. Social media? Pretty sure that they call a hashtag ‘that waffley-looking button on a telephone’.
You need to explain to them that the traditional marketing playbook is essentially broken, and you can do this with a few simple rebuttals:
Boss: What about television ads?
You: A ‘low cost’ television advert can run up about $10,000, you have no control over who is watching, and the majority of the world watches on-demand television online on their mobile devices. Aka TV is dead.
Boss: What about a piece in the newspaper?
You: Once again, these can cost a small fortune. Plus, haven’t you heard? Print media is on its way out – aka it is dead. Newspapers are moving online. Also, it wouldn’t cost us a single cent to post a blog onto our website – content marketing is the new newspaper and it is accessible, traceable and linkable back to our site.
Boss: How about we send out marketing goods in the mail?
You: There is a green revolution on our hands! We need to get in with the hipsters and find them online – they will love us for saving the trees.
Thirdly, if you are pushed for time and want to start your course ASAP then you need to stress to your boss that there isn’t long to catch that first wave of inbound before everyone else jumps on the bandwagon. If you start doing Inbound Marketing in your company then you will be building blogs, creating CTAs, posting on social media, and crafting landing pages before any of your competitors and will therefore be beating them in Google's indexed pages, SEO rankings and social following. If getting a head start and beating your competitors isn’t a top selling point for your Inbound Marketing training to your boss, then nothing will be!
Finally, the most important part of pitching your Inbound Marketing training course of choice to your boss is knowing everything you can know about the program – including what you will learn, how long it will take you and how much it is going to cost. To get all the details in one spot, download our free brochure:
If you need any more information, feel free to contact our Inbound Marketing Sydney training team or have a look at our course modules by clicking below:
Keywords: inbound marketing, marketing training, marketing training sydney