If you want to have a successful business, you have to sell. If you want to sell, you have to market your business. As you grow your business, the solutions you used at first are likely going to hold you back, so along the way it is important to look at scaling up your marketing and sales. Let’s talk about what this process looks like!
Usually start-ups operate with leaner resources. It makes sense. They haven’t built the reputation of the brand, a solid client base, or consistent referral sources. It is natural to begin with a closer eye on outgoing resources.
At the same time, we know the ratio of prospects that become closed sales is generally far from one-to-one. In order to reach your desired number of customers, you are inevitably going to have to reach a higher volume of leads with your marketing to take enough of them deep into your sales process. (For more information on that, check out this Tip on how Marketing is a Numbers Games).
Inefficiency is built into the process from the beginning, which means you have to get smart. Scaling up your marketing and sales is crucial, but you don’t want to hemorrhage those leads when you do.
Scaling up your #marketing and #sales is crucial, but you don't want to hemorrhage those leads when you do. #business #smallbusiness #smallbiz #smb Share on XAll of this points to one simple truth. You have to know your numbers.
How many people can you – or anyone else on your sales team – handle in your sales pipeline? Although marketing is easy to do in volume, sales typically gets to a point of one-to-one communication. The warmer the leads, the easier they will be to close, but knowing how much time and effort that process will really take is an important place to start.
As you think through how many people are selling for your business, ask yourself how many leads need to get to them through your marketing work in order to achieve your revenue goals.
Think about those numbers, but the quantity is not the only thing that matters. Quality does too.
What if 80% of the leads you meet through one networking event would ultimately become customers? What if only 3% of the leads that come to you through an ad in a magazine would ultimately become customers? This is an apples to oranges comparison, and yet you still need to make it. At the end of the day, your business has limited resources, and you have to decide where to spend the time or money on marketing.
Let’s say you decide to focus on quality leads and invest more time into that networking event. That’s great, because you’ll see results for your time. But if you want to double your leads next year, how will you do it?
I have hit decision points like this many times in my business. I constantly weigh out the choices I need to make to scale my business while staying in alignment with my brand. Because keeping the integrity of your brand while you scale up is critical.
Keeping the integrity of your brand while you scale up is critical. #business #smallbusiness #smallbiz #smb #entrepreneur Share on XFor example, when I looked at adding automation to parts of my online process, I knew that I needed to start scaling up without coming off as a robot. My brand is important for my business. To keep the integrity of my brand, I focus on creating automation or efficiency where it would enhance the process when I might have accidentally dropped it instead. These are little decisions I have made along the way that have created a business with more efficient reach now.
What are the things you can do in scaling up your marketing and sales? You can add to your team. You can structure your team meetings to find areas of synergy. You can automate or create online sequences. You can pre-record or batch content. You can link applications together to create efficiency. You can pump money into ads or marketing solutions that will help you increase your audience quickly.
When the business is smaller, the time lost to inefficiency may feel easier to absorb, but as you scale up it will manifest in duplicated work, lost leads, or inconsistency. Work out the details now. The more efficient your marketing and sales plan is, the easier it will be to scale up and transfer knowledge. And the better your community will feel.
The more efficient your marketing and sales plan is, the easier it will be to scale up and transfer knowledge. #business #smallbiz #smb Share on XSo, if you are at a point of scaling up your marketing and sales, this is a great time to think through some key questions. What is the quantitative capacity for everyone on your team? What are the values of your brand that need to be protected? And what solutions will allow you to maintain that quality of brand while meeting new quantitative metrics?
As the owner of your business, this will be one of the many decisions that has no clear right answer. Just start out on a productive road for finding the answer you need!