Author: Franz Malten Buemann

Conditional formatting is a feature in Google Sheets in which a cell is formatted in a particular way when certain conditions are met. The formatting can include highlighting, bolding, italicizing – just about any visual changes to the cell.
Just as it can be done for the cell you’re currently in, conditional formatting can also be set based on conditions met in another cell.

Let’s dive into how to create this condition based on multiple criteria.
How Conditional Formatting Works
To learn how to set conditional formatting, let’s use this workbook as an example.

It’s a workbook showing website traffic year over year from Q4 2020 to Q4 2021, with the page views along with the year-over-year percentage change.
Here’s what we want to accomplish here: When the percentage change is positive YoY, the cell turns green. When it’s negative, the cell turns red. This makes it easy to get a quick performance overview before diving into the details.
Here are the steps to set the conditional formatting.
1. Select the cell you want to format, click on “Format” from the navigation bar, then click on “Conditional Formatting.”

2. While staying in the “Single color” tab, double-check that the cell under “Apply to range” is the cell you want to format.

3. Set your format rules.

It may automatically default to a standard conditional formatting formula. In this case, open the dropdown menu under “Format cells if…” to select your rules. Options will look as follows:
4. Choose your formatting style, then click “Done.”
5. Confirm the rule was applied under “Conditional Formatting Rules.”

6. Add another rule if needed.

7. Return to cell to view formatting, then drag the cursor to apply to other cells, if needed.

Now that you understand the basics, let’s cover how to use conditional formatting based on other cells.
Conditional Formatting Based on Another Cell Value
1. Select the cell you want to format.

2. Click on “Format” in the navigation bar, then select “Conditional Formatting.”

3. Under “Format Rules,” select “Custom formula is.”

4. Write your formula, then click “Done.”

5. Confirm your rule has been applied and check the cell.

Conditional Formatting Based on Another Cell Range
To format based on another cell range, you follow many of the same steps you would for a cell value. What changes is the formula you write.
1. Select the cell you want to format.

2. Click on “Format” in the navigation bar, then select “Conditional Formatting.”

3. Under “Format Rules,” select “Custom formula is.”

4. Write your formula using the following format: =value range < [value], select your formatting style, then click “Done.”

5. Confirm your rule has been applied and check the cell.

Google Sheets Conditional Formatting Based on Another Cell Color
Currently, Google Sheets does not offer a way to use conditional formatting based on the color of another cell. You can only use it based on:

Values – higher than, greater than, equal to, in between
Text – contains, starts with, ends with, matches
Dates – is before, is after, is exactly
Emptiness – is empty, is not empty

To achieve your goal, you’d have to use the condition of the cell to format the other.
Let’s use an example.

Say you want to format cell A2 (September 2020) to be red and match the color of cell E2 (-20%). There’s no formula that allows you to create a condition based on color. However, you can create a custom formula based on E2’s values.
You can say that if cell E2’s values are less than 0, cell A2 turns red. The formula is as follows: = [The other cell] < [value]. In this case, the formula would be =e2<0, as it signifies that cell A2 should turn red if E2’s value is less than 0.

With so many functions to play with, Google Sheets can seem daunting. By following these simple steps, you can easily format your cells for quick scanning.

Facebook remains the most commonly used social media platform, with a whopping 2.8 billion active users. As an eCommerce business owner, this means when you use Facebook to advertise your eCommerce store, you can get wider reach, engagement, visibility, and ultimately more sales.  According to Statista’s 2021 global survey, 98% of marketers use Facebook to…
The post How to Advertise Your eCommerce Store on Facebook appeared first on Benchmark Email.

Last Updated on March 9, 2022 by Rakesh Gupta Big Idea or Enduring Question: How to set up Sender Policy Framework (SPF) feature to allow receiving message transfer agents (MTAs) to validate that the sending MTAs are authorized to send email from the Salesforce domain? Objectives: After reading this blog,
The post How to Setup Sender Policy Framework (SPF) for Salesforce appeared first on Automation Champion.

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One of my favorite movies is “School of Rock,” which also happens to be one of 2003’s best films. In the movie, Jack Black poses as a substitute teacher at a private school, and, after noticing the students are musically talented, he turns the 10-year-olds into a fully-fledged rock band.
When assigning roles to the students, he approaches the class president and deems her band manager because she had the organizational skills needed to help the band run smoothly. “Summer,” he says, “You’re in charge of the whole thing.”
When I think about marketing operations, I think of this quote — without a team, businesses that depend on technology would have a less-than-seamless experience carrying out their duties. In this post, you’ll learn more about marketing operations and why these teams are essential to a business.

The people involved in marketing operations build a foundation that reinforces and supports marketing efforts. It makes it easier to achieve goals by implementing systems to ensure marketers are best equipped to succeed at their jobs.

Why is marketing operations important?
93% of B2B marketers say the marketing operation’s function is important or critical to delivering digital transformation. After all, without marketing operations, it would be tough for marketing teams to complete essential activities effectively because they enable other marketing departments to bring cohesion to campaigns and processes.
For example, as technology is necessary to carry out most marketing tasks, a team to manage the complexity of that technology and ensure it works as it should is also necessary — which is exactly what MOps is.
Here are some examples of situations that can be rectified by having a marketing operations team:

Problem
MOps Solution

Your investments in marketing technology don’t provide the solutions you thought they would.
MOps ensure that teams are enabled by technology solutions and eliminate tech debt.

You want to streamline data reporting and metrics tracking to understand ROI.
MOps focus on processes and systems for data reporting to enable teams.

Strategy execution is a timely process, and you want to lower the amount of time it takes from start to finish.
MOps helps team improve processes to become more efficient.

At HubSpot, the marketing ops team is responsible for supporting the systems and processes that enable the marketing team to perform optimally in their roles. This includes everything from permissions, conversational marketing, user data, forms, and email operations.
An essential function of how well a marketing ops team works is proper management.

As a point of reference, marketing operations is the process of strategizing and optimizing, while marketing ops management defines how that strategizing and optimizing will happen.
Since marketing operations management aims to increase efficiency, ops teams often have a hand in content planning and campaign analysis.

Role of Marketing Operations
Marketing operations is a combination of different processes that contribute to marketing team success. The role of marketing ops encompasses:

Project management
Strategic planning
Organization benchmarking
Workflow process development and documentation
Customer, market, and competitive intelligence research
Performance measurement
Campaign analysis and reporting
Data management
Process development and implementation

Much of the role of marketing operations comes down to strategic decision making for key marketing strategies, and seeing those projects through to completion based on analyzed data.

Marketing Operations Strategy
Marketing ops team members need to have an expansive skillset. Some of the typical activities this department deals with are email operations, systems analysis, customer data and marketing, user operations, and lead rotation.
All of these roles come together to align the process and platforms needed to carry out marketing tasks for the greater marketing team.
When thinking about a marketing ops strategy, consider the problems the marketing ops team needs to solve, taking into account the needs of customers, stakeholders, and the employees of your company.

1. Identify what you want your operations strategy to accomplish for stakeholders.
Firstly, you need to effectively communicate and involve your stakeholder(s) when trying to create your marketing operations strategy. By doing so, you can better align the team and work toward solving high-level needs and priorities that may not be explicitly clear beforehand.
This is where the importance of internal service level agreements (SLAs) come in. These contracts establish a set of deliverables to another party that sets clear expectations and mitigates issues that may arise.
For instance, key stakeholders might want to make email marketing a more valuable process. The marketing ops team would then be responsible for the processes and systems that support this endeavor, ensuring that:

The organization has effective email marketing technology
The marketing team is enabled to send emails and create improved content offers
The sales team is enabled and empowered to source quality leads
All parties have what they need and are communicating effectively during each step of the process

2. Figure out a measurable metric to determine the success of your strategy.
The next step in strategizing is to identify how the team would measure the success of the project. When you figure out a measurable metric, you’ll be able to keep track of the strategy’s success as your team works through the plan. The metric will remind your team of the goal you want to accomplish and what stakeholders want to see as a result of your plan.
In this example, the team might conclude, “Click-through rate and total number of clicks are how we want to measure the value that email marketing brings to the business. We will calculate the click-through rate by dividing the number of clicks in a month by the number of unique email recipient impressions in a month and multiply it by 100 for the percentage.”
3. Define your goal(s) using the SMART format.
With your metrics identified, the next step in defining a marketing ops strategy is outlining significant SMART goals. This format is important because it gives your team a better sense of direction and organization in strategy execution.
An example of an effective SMART goal is, “We will increase total clicks from email by 25% in one year.” because it’s:

Specific: It’s not a broad goal; it’s focused on email marketing.
Measurable: It can be measured by a concrete metric (total clicks).
Attainable: It’s possible to see this level of change in the business.
Realistic: The team is capable of working toward 25% of improvement.
Time-bound: This goal has a set duration of one year.

4. If needed, communicate how colleagues can take part in refining your strategy.
With the goal and metrics identified, your next step is to outline what this change would mean for affected colleagues, such as the team members who create and distribute email marketing messages.
The team might conclude that “Marketers can expect an easier email guideline process, a more effective format, and to receive a form to offer input about how to make that happen.”
5. Determine actionable steps in your plan that will help you reach your goals.
Determining actionable steps will help your marketing ops team figure out what needs to be done, identify the resources required to see success, and stay organized as they work through their tasks.
A marketing ops professional will need to run these steps by the stakeholders who actually influence the plan. For instance, they would be communicating steps to reach the previously stated SMART goal like:

Switching to a more efficient email technology provider.
Ensuring that the data being used to measure these goals is clean and accurate.
Enabling the marketing team to source more quality leads.
Enabling the sales team with better templates or sales enablement resources.

With these steps communicated, stakeholders can provide assistance or suggestions where it’s needed, and the marketing ops team can get closer to execution.
6. Assign team members to specific tasks that will contribute to the completion of your goals.
Having that set in place, what’s next for the marketing ops team is to assign team members specific tasks to help them achieve their goals. For instance, one team member might be in charge of redefining email marketing contact lists. Another might be in charge of auditing the current workflows in place for email marketing.
As team members complete these tasks, they would check them off in a centralized space so the entire team can stay updated on the project’s status.
Marketing operations teams are equally effective with their strategies and management capabilities as Summer’s character in “School of Rock.” With her processes, the group was able to obtain their own rehearsal space and offer music classes.
Align and Optimize Your Marketing Operations
Marketing ops can come up with ways to increase customer satisfaction and ease the job of marketers. Their strategies make marketing activities and duties accessible to all, and because of that, are an essential part of a business.

Finding qualified candidates to fill your open positions can be challenging. Job posting sites claim to make the process easy by connecting you with hundreds if not thousands of potential employees. But having such a large pool of candidates can be overwhelming.
Just thinking about the sheer volume of work involved in reviewing applications, narrowing them down to good fits, and then vetting those potential candidates is enough to make anyone’s head explode.

You work with or run a solid organization with wonderful employees. How do you make sure that you don’t get a bevy of potential candidates, but rather the right candidate?
Look at this like finding the perfect place to take your significant other on a special occasion. Sure, you could do a Google search for random restaurants in your neighborhood. You could even check a review site for recommendations.
However, you don’t know any of those people, so how much weight does their opinion really carry? Instead of taking a risk on a very special evening, why not reach out to the people you trust? Asking friends and family for a recommendation is a much safer avenue to finding the perfect date night experience.
What if we applied this type of thinking to your search for the perfect employee? Rather than leave it up to a random internet search, ask the people you already know, like, and trust… your employees.
What is an employee referral program?
An employee referral program is a structured system by which you ask existing employees to recommend people they know for open positions within your organization. Employees often receive some sort of incentive for their assistance.
An employee referral program leverages the power of your employees’ networks and can save you time, money, and a huge headache when it comes to hiring the best talent for your business.
Benefits of an Employee Referral Program
There are many benefits to utilizing an employee referral program as part of your hiring strategy. These include:
1. High Quality Hires
Good employees know what skills are necessary to excel in a position and understand the workplace culture. When they recommend someone for the job, there’s a good chance they have the qualifications necessary to successfully perform in the role.
2. Decreased Turnover Rates
With employee turnover rates on the rise, you’ll want to keep it front of mind when you’re making hiring decisions. According to ERIN, 45% of referred employees stay with a company longer compared to 22% from job boards and 33% from career sites.
3. Less Time and Lower Cost Per Hire
According to LinkedIn, employees hired through referrals take an average of 29 days to hire and onboard, whereas job boards can take 39 days and a career site can take upwards of 55 days. The less time it takes to hire and onboard means less revenue lost, fewer employees stressed because they are handling multiple jobs, and more productivity from your new hire.
Using a headhunter? According to Jobvite, you can expect to pay between 15% and 25% of the gross annual salary of the candidate. If you’re hiring an employee at $100k per year, that’s $15k to $25k in headhunting fees. The cost to reward an employee for an amazing referral? Around $2,000.
4. Increase Employee Satisfaction and Loyalty
Doesn’t it feel nice when you have a hand in the decision-making process? Employees that refer candidates feel like they’ve contributed to the company, making them more engaged and more likely to stay.
Employee Referral Program Ideas
Now that you see the benefit to you as the employer or hiring manager, how do you create an employee referral program that encourages your existing employees to introduce you to their quality contacts? There are a number of ways to do this and best practices that you can adopt to get the most out of your program.
Make it Clear What You’re Looking For
In a mid-sized to a large company, one department may have no idea what another one is working on. In order for employees to make connections, they need to know what your expectations are for the new position. When you reach out to employees looking for suggestions, provide them with all the details you can. This should include:

Job descriptions
Desired experience
Necessary skills

Make it Easy for Employees to Refer
Consider the referral experience from your employees’ point of view. Is there a simple form for them to submit when they recommend someone, or do they have to jump through a variety of complicated hoops to pass along their referrals? Some companies even host recruitment happy hours where existing employees can invite friends who might be a good fit.
The easier you make it for your employees to refer their contacts, the more quality candidates will be presented to you.
Keep Your Employees Updated on Referral Status
It’s frustrating to make a suggestion or an introduction and not know if it’s been acted upon. When your employee recommends a colleague, keep them updated as to the steps of the hiring process. Some times to check-in include:

When you receive an application
When you make contact
When an interview is scheduled
When a position has been offered to their contact
When the position has been given to someone else (after the candidate has been contacted)

Provide a Juicy Incentive
Surprisingly, this may not always be a monetary reward. While money is always appreciated, you can offer a combination of “cash” and experiences, time off, gifts, etc. For some, these may be even more desired than a financial incentive. One great option is to give your employees the choice. That way, you know they’ll be motivated to help. A few employee referral incentive ideas to get your creative juices flowing:

Cash bonuses
Gift certificates to their favorite restaurants and local establishments
Weekend getaways or week-long excursions for frequent referrers
VIP parking
Show tickets
Physical gifts (it’s important to let them choose so they don’t end up with something they can’t use)
Perks like a gym membership or massage

The sky’s the limit when it comes to thanking your employees for their referrals. You can also consider using a platform like XoxoDay to make distributing employee referral perks as easy and streamlined as possible.
Show Appreciation for “Frequent Referrers”
If you’ve got employees that consistently send you quality employee candidates, acknowledge them publicly. This shows your amazing team members that they are appreciated and motivates other employees to step up their referral game.
Employee Referral Program Examples
Looking for real-world examples of these programs in action? We’ve compiled a few employee referral program samples to introduce you to some of the possibilities.

Inmobi, a mobile advertising company offers referring employees the choice of a bike or a trip to Bali. They park the vehicles in front of the company headquarters to motivate employees to participate.
Accenture, a consulting and IT company encourages philanthropy and community involvement by letting their employees donate a part of their referral bonus to a charity of their choice.
Distillery, an American software development company gifts their employees new tech gadgets for every referral they make.
Atlassian software company encourages employees to “Refer-a-Mate” and offers them $2,000 in cash bonuses.
Intel tech company takes financial incentives one step further by doubling their employee referral reward for women, minorities, and veterans that are referred to the company.

If you’d like to tap into a pool of qualified, trustworthy, easy-to-hire (and onboard) candidates, an employee referral program can help. Instituting this type of hiring process in your organization can save you money, time, headaches, and the pain of having to repeatedly hire for the same position when your first employee doesn’t work out well. In addition, you’ll improve your workplace culture and enhance your brand.
An employee referral program is the best thing you can do to improve the quality of your incoming employees. Choose your incentives wisely and then watch the quality candidates roll on in.