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Money can often be the barrier between getting stuck where you are and attending to the next level. This includes having or not having a budget, using it properly, hidden revenue, and even misaligned goals—all of which affect your growth trajectory. These 4 common secrets have helped my company take our clients to the next level.
1. Financial (*5*) for ROI
The first blind spot we frequently see with latest clients is a lack of clear reporting connections between tools like ads and CRMs like HubSpot to see which channels are driving the biggest return on investment (ROI). Do you know your best-performing channels? Or your best-performing piece of sales copy? What is the most-opened document that results in a closed deal?
And we’re not only talking about marketing and sales, this is applicable to many other areas. connected platforms — for example, closed loop revenue or ERP systems. When things are not connected, they are disconnected and isolated. You find yourself blind. Without connecting marketing tools to revenue tools, and that’s CRMs, finance platforms, or ERPs, to call a few, there’s a disconnect and arms and legs find yourself moving in different directions.
Here’s a easy example we see all the time: If you knew that one channel was generating more deals with a 75% faster conversion rate, wouldn’t you invest more time and energy into that channel than the one with only a 10% conversion rate? Many people don’t need to share revenue numbers inside the company, but all that information informs other departments; without sharing those revenue numbers, your financial secrets are kept in hidden silos.
2. Strategic investments to avoid blind spots
Another financial blind spot is a lack of investment in marketing. We have had clients come in with no budget and no in-house marketing team, but we desired to grow by 150% and spend a total of $1,000. I wish it were possible to attain that sort of growth, but unfortunately it is not. The old saying that you simply get what you pay for, or that it takes money to make money, is true. Your investment goals should match your growth goals. The amount of cash invested shouldn’t only be measured in short-term, quick wins, but also in long-term investments in growth.
You would never judge HR strictly by the variety of employees you hire. However, when looking at the big picture of longevity among many other vital KPIs, you wouldn’t use HR for a few months. It’s something that’s constant and requires care and attention. Marketing is no different—if you measure marketing strictly by the variety of leads, you’re missing the big picture. Marketing helps push leads through nurturing campaigns, creates automation, lead scoring, builds latest campaigns and tests, supports sales enablement, and many other components. The buying cycle is rarely a straight line from click to buy, unless you’re talking about Amazon.
That said, everyone has budgets, margins, and safety belts they should stay inside. I’m not saying throw your budget to the wind, but your goal should align with your budget. If you have modest growth goals, be realistic about the budget needed to attain them. Set incremental micro goals, but stay the course for long-term growth.
3. Data-driven decisions that prevent money
Another financial secret that costs firms money is spending money without the data to back it up. We had a company ask about a latest website, a complete overhaul, latest navigation, latest content, latest layouts, migration to a latest CMS, latest theme, and all that. They said that they had a budget of $75,000 for the entire project. Sounds great in theory, right? Willingness to take a position? Checked. Got a budget? Checked. Know what you wish the final result to be? Checked. But when we asked them the next query, they looked at us like we were crazy: “Do you have the data to back up the changes you’re making?” Do you utilize a tool like Hotjar to see real user data that shows how your proposed changes will impact existing queries and the only source your sales team is currently using to generate leads?
The answer was no. When they put the heat map on, do you know what happened? Well, they desired to build a latest navigation and replace the old one—almost 90% of traffic was going to two pages of the site directly from the navigation, each of which they originally desired to remove. In this case, it wasn’t just about money, it was about ensuring that the decisions you were making around your budget were based on real data: user data, sales data, marketing data, and more. The more informed you are by closing the loop on your data, the higher your bottom line might be.
4. Modern marketing channels that drive growth
The biggest cost to you is probably using old channels without measurement. Companies have spent the last decade on traditional marketing channels and are moving to digital. Their historical growth has been based on things like trade shows, print, postcards, and online magazines. We ask them what their ROI is on each channel, and they’ll rarely offer you a specific revenue number and say it’s brand awareness. Some budgets will be upwards of $50,000 to $100,000 spent on these traditional methods, but there’s no ROI, and they still proceed to do it.
When the pandemic hit, we saw a massive influx of companies moving from their boots on the ground to digital. The lockdown modified every thing; there have been no more trade shows, no more knocking on doors, and no one picking up the mail or faxes every day. Traditional sales channels became difficult and outdated and forced a latest level of openness to try latest ways of doing work. For online magazine ads, there are many ways to capture them, we will use UTM tracking, referral analytics or create a custom landing page for the offer and capture leads directly. Without sending them to a landing page or form, you are relying solely on the online publication for lead capture and analytics. We had people showing a list of just names, without email addresses to trace, or showing only a random number of tourists to the page, not a single name. It is vital to know what they might be providing for reporting and tracking when you publish or use traditional channels. The rule is to make use of connections and tools that use old-fashioned methods in technology, and not spend money blindly on channels that can not be measured.
Stop wasting time, energy and income on these blind spots. They have easy solutions so you may avoid them and focus on growing your small business!