Growing in today’s economy

We’re getting asked by clients and prospects alike, “How do I protect my company in this economy?”  If you’re wondering who is going to survive the next 12-18 months, look no further than your local trade publications, magazines, newspapers, and business events.  Track who is advertising online and in print — who is using direct mail, cold-calling and e-marketing to generate leads.  Who is knocking on your door or the door of your prospects.  These are the survivors.  Those that are continuing their marketing efforts and aggressively working on lead generation, prospecting and customer retention are the companies that will survive and thrive when we come out of these challenging times.

How does this translate into actionable tactics for you?  Here are some of the strategies we’re recommending to our clients and tactics we’re helping to execute:

1.  Focus on your existing customer base first! These are the diamonds in your back yard so figure out how you can grow the lifetime value (LTV) of your client base.

The first step is to create a visual representation of what you are selling and what they are buying so you can see the holes.  By creating a simple grid, you can quickly see what services you can cross sell or upsell to your existing customers.

Then put together a sales and marketing plan to promote these additional products and services to your clients. This does not have to be an expensive project.  Give your sales people a list of the customers and a directive to go sell the missing pieces.  Create an e-marketing campaign that supports the sales effort.  E-mail marketing works best when the audience already has a relationship with you — like your customers!  Be sure and use a tool like Constant Contact or My Emma to deliver your emails.  That way you can track performance.

Get in front of your customers.  This is a great time for senior management to reconnect with clients.  The senior management team in your company should be visiting and talking with your most profitable customers.  Listen to what they have to say, what are they looking for?  What are there concerns?  How can you translate this into a solution you can sell?  Just make sure that before you send the team out to visit with customers that you’ve given clear direction on the objectives of the meeting.  The goal is not to communicate value, but to create value for your customer.  And you can’t do this without listening first.

2.  Make sure you are targeting the right prospects.  Be brutal about whom you and your sales team are spending time with.  Narrow your focus to the most profitable verticals for your business.  There is no room for fluff right now, or meetings for the sake of meetings.

Create a clear rating system for prospects.  What are the minimum requirements in order for someone to qualify as a prospect for your company?  Don’t waste time on prospects that do not meet these qualifications.

Make sure you have a tracking system for sales prospects.  It can be an online system like Salesforce.com, a software solution like ACT! or Goldmine, or a simple spreadsheet.  But find a way to track the progress of each opportunity.  And make sure everyone is using the same system to describe where a prospect is in the sales cycle.

Strategize as a team and use your collective wisdom to figure out how to move sales forward.  Include your sales engineers, help desk managers, installers, etc.  not just your sales team.  That guy in the middle cubicle hunkered down answering client calls may have some great insight into the “pain” your prospects want addressed.

Involve your marketing department in the lead qualification process.  Give feedback on the leads they’ve been generating for you.  Have your sales and marketing department leaders sit down and come to a written agreement on what a sales lead looks like, and when it should be turned over to sales.  Then track the pipeline according to these measurements.  Make sure someone from marketing attends your sales meetings on a regular basis.  Even better, invite different people in the marketing department to go on sales calls and observe the sales process first hand.

3.  Increase your marketing efforts.  This one is pretty obvious, but we’re looking at more guerrilla marketing tactics as opposed to your traditional avenues.

Position your company as the industry expert.  Find ways to get thought leadership articles published.  Where can you get a speaking engagement?  What trade publications can you offer to write articles for?  What white papers can you create and offer online or at trade shows?  Of course, the hardest part is getting someone to actually WRITE the articles or papers.  Nobody ever seems to have the time.   We’ve come up with an effective and inexpensive way to address this.

• Set up an “interview” between the subject matter expert and someone who can ask the leading questions for the article.  Even if they are in the same office, have the two people use www.freeconference.com or a similar service to record the interview.
• Have the interview transcribed into a WORD document.
• Have someone edit the document into the article, thought piece, or part of the white paper.  (White papers usually take several interviews and should follow and outline.)
• Have your subject matter expert review the edited document, and provide any changes/feedback.
• Now go publish, pitch, or promote your document!

Start an online advertising campaign.  This is still one of the most effective ways to generate raw leads and build your website ranking.  Just make sure you are working with someone that knows how to set up, monitor and continually improve your SEM program.  We’ve created some online campaigns for clients that cost $10 – $15 a day and they have generated numerous raw leads.  We use this at Zephyr — primarily for our proposal support services.  We’ve probably invested about $2,000 in SEM this year and generated about 10 inquiries, resulting in sales totalling $45,000.  Not a bad ROI!  It doesn’t replace the sales and marketing effort but it does enhance it.

Make sure your website is a workhorse for you.  Do you have Google Analytics or a similar tracking system installed on your website?  Are you monitoring the behavior of your site visitors?  Is your website operating as an essential business tool for your company?  If not, then you need to upgrade your website.  Fortunately, this doesn’t have to be an expensive project.  Today’s new blogging tools like WordPress and TypePad can be used to create very robust websites.  The website you are visiting right now as developed in WordPress.  Plus you’ve got a lot an almost unlimited number of cool tools and widgets you can plug into your site without the expense of paying for development from scratch.

4.  Start measuring everything. Track your pipeline, new projects, existing customer sales, website traffic, customer satisfaction, and all marketing/sales expenditures.  Figure out what the key performance indicators (KPI) are for your business.   It could be hours billed per week, units sold, email inquiries, downloads from your website or new phone inquiries each week.  It could also be how many networking events your sales people attend, how many new prospects are put into the funnel or how many proposals are generated each month.  What ever you need to measure, make sure you monitor it at a minimum once a week.  Some KPIs may need to be reviewed daily.

Finally, we recommend that you start meeting on a regular basis with your key company staff.  Whether it is a quick daily huddle or a weekly all hands review — you want to make sure that everyone is focused on the business objectives and corporate goals.

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