Your marketing is who you are. It’s the first–and sometimes only–impression that many people are going to have of you in an online ecosystem flooded with noise. Your marketing assets might be your one shot at cutting through all that static and standing apart from your competitors. And to those who are already familiar with what you have to offer, your marketing is the continuation of a story that will hopefully end with trust being built, word of your organization being spread organically, and achieving higher conversion rates.
However, if your marketing isn’t up to snuff, it can send you spiraling back into the noise, cause you to lose the trust you’ve managed to build, and leave you in a less-than-ideal situation overall. This is why it’s crucial to have a QA (Quality Assurance) person on your team along with a detailed QA process for them to follow.
“My crazy checklists!” Laughs Sadé Spears, SalesLabX’s resident QA guru. “I feel like my process has changed over time. When I first started, I think I depended more heavily on the checklists. Now I’ve noticed that–since I know what I’m looking for–I’ll just go through organically at first, and then I’ll go back to the checklist to make sure there’s nothing I missed.”
Sadé has the incredibly important job of making sure that all of the assets we create and maintain are functioning correctly, adhere to the basic principles of good design, and match the specifications set by ourselves and our clients. Her keen eye for detail keeps everything running smoothly and is more than partially responsible for our 98.78% accuracy rate when it comes to task completion.
“I know what should be there and what shouldn’t be there, and I know if something looks weird. My current process is looking at the asset, making sure it matches the task description, and after I’ve gone through it, I’ll open up my checklist, and say, ‘Okay, let’s go through this one by one.’”
She makes it sound simple, but bear in mind that Sadé and the QA team do this for every landing page, email, social media image, animation, and developer update that we create.; not only our own SLX assets but the assets of each of our clients. It’s a massively important set of responsibilities that has the potential to rub your coworkers the wrong way if your company culture has any friction, but Sadé and the rest of SalesLabX know that her feedback is mission-critical, and as a result, her QA suggestions are not only heard but embraced in good faith.
“It’s actually great because I feel like I get to talk to everybody in the organization and really get to know them. I know my job is like, ‘Oh, you’ve gotta criticize everybody’s work’, but really you just get to talk to people. I have the excuse of ‘work’ to talk to people, and I love it. Everyone is very open to constructive criticism, and everyone has this general underlying feeling of we’re here to help each other. You don’t feel bad about calling anything out, because it’s not a judgment, it’s more like, ‘Let me help you
out here.’”
The success we’ve achieved at SalesLabX stems from that spirit of communication and collaboration. We’re a lived-in, united team of experts and professionals that strive for excellence every day. Other organizations think that you can just buy each piece of the marketing puzzle and have it work out, but our ability to create assets, interpret data, and strategize wasn’t bought, it was forged.
We share knowledge, learn from each other, and hype our teammates up in a way that increases our effectiveness day after day. We learn about jobs we don’t have and tools we don’t use so that when we interface with one another, we can meet on even ground.
“I always viewed marketing from a consumer standpoint, which is not much at all.” says Sadé, “Now I know things about tools like Account Engagement (Pardot) and Salesforce that I would never have known before. Also, basic design rules! Like, if you put too many things on a page, people will just stop caring. Or, if someone sees a form with over five input fields on it, they’re probably not going to look at it anymore. Same thing when you have emails with too many links. When I get marketing emails in my personal inbox, I end up looking at the design of it, which I never did before!”
Taking note of email details comes with the QA territory. Each email we build for our clients is tested to make sure it works on just about every email client you can imagine. We’re talking specific versions of the Mail app on iPhones from 6 generations ago and beyond! We’re constantly asking questions like,
- Is dark mode going to have an effect on the images or text?
- How fast does the email load?
- Is everything aligned properly
We do this every time to make sure that your message is received correctly every single time. It takes some time, but when something is worth doing, it’s worth doing right. Then again, that’s the benefit of partnering with an external team like SalesLabX: We take the time, and you take your time back. We’ve already done the research, we’ve already audited your data and assets, and we know what needs to be done in order to turn your marketing strategy into a winning one. We’ve seen too many organizations undercut their own message by falling prey to basic mistakes.
“I feel like a lot of it is giving too much information. Overcrowding the page or the email. Just simplicity.” Says Sadé, in regard to errors she sees a lot of organizations making. “We’re all complex creatures, but if you bombard people with too much, they don’t know where to look. That becomes, ‘Okay, next thing’. Our partners get better the longer they’re with us, but I see that right off the bat with a lot of them. It’s overwhelming! C’mon guys, give us some white space! For me, that’s what I see as the number
one mistake.”
When we see these mistakes being made, we’ll reach out to those partners with our suggestions, but sometimes there’s a little bit of pushback.
“The design leads will call these things out. We have to say, ‘This is what we suggest’, and the client will sometimes say, ‘Well, I don’t know about that’. Then we’ll give them 2 options: ‘Here’s what you want, and here’s what we think will perform better. You decide!’”
A keen eye and good communication skills are very important qualities for a QA team to possess, but at the end of the day, what’s really going to drive their success is a supportive environment and an organization that’s always seeking to better itself.
“When you work here, it doesn’t feel like any place you’ve worked at before. You feel seen, you feel heard, and everyone is generally very nice.”
Sadé Spears–a bonafide expert in high-quality operations–has one final piece of advice for other organizations seeking to replicate the success that she and the rest of the SalesLabX team have cultivated:
“Invest in the people you work with. People are willing to do more, the happier they are, you know?”
