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Money is often the barrier between getting stuck in your current situation or breaking through to the next level. This includes having or not having a budget, using your budget appropriately, hidden revenue, and even misaligned goals, all of which affect your growth trajectory. These four common tips have helped my firm take our clients to the next level:
1. Financial Transparency of ROI
The first blind spot we often see with new clients is not knowing which channels are bringing in the most return on investment (ROI) because there isn’t a clear reporting connection between tools like ads and a CRM like HubSpot. Do you know which channels are performing best? Or what sales copy is performing best? What are the most opened documents that close deals?
This isn’t just about marketing and sales, it applies to many fields. Connected Platforms For example, closed-loop revenue and ERP systems. If they aren’t connected, they become fragmented and siloed. You end up flying blind. If you don’t connect your marketing and revenue tools (CRM, finance platforms, ERP, etc.), you create a disconnect and your hands and feet are moving in different directions.
Here’s a simple example we see all the time: If you find that a channel is driving more deals with a 75% faster conversion rate, why would you invest more time and energy in that channel than a channel that only has a 10% conversion rate? Many people don’t want to share revenue numbers within their companies, yet all that information gets passed on to other departments. If you don’t share these revenue numbers, your money’s secrets stay locked in hidden silos.
Related: Increasing transparency leads to $100 million in annual revenue — 3 strategies that helped us succeed
2. Strategic investments to avoid blind spots
Another financial blind spot is not investing in marketing. I’ve had leads come in with no budget or in-house marketing team, and we want to grow 150% and spend $1,000 total. I wish this kind of growth was possible, but unfortunately it’s not. The old adage “you get what you pay for” or “it takes money to make money” rings true. Your investment goals should align with your growth goals. Your investment should be measured not just in terms of short-term short-term results, but also in terms of long-term investments in growth.
You would never evaluate your HR department on the number of hires alone. But when you look at the big picture of longevity among many other important KPIs, you wouldn’t use HR for more than a few months. HR is a constant and it requires care and attention. Marketing is no different. If you evaluate marketing strictly on the number of leads, you miss the big picture. Marketing drives leads through nurturing campaigns and helps with automation, lead scoring, building new campaigns and tests, supporting promotional activities, and many other elements. Unless we’re talking about Amazon, the buying cycle is rarely a straight line of click-to-buy.
That said, everyone has budgets, margins, and bumper lanes they need to adhere to. We’re not saying to scrimp on your budget, but your goals should fit within it. If you have modest growth goals, be realistic about the budget you need to get there. Set incremental micro-goals and set yourself on a course for long-term growth.
Related: You won’t have a strong budget unless you follow these 5 tips
3. Reduce costs with data-driven decisions
Another money trick that costs businesses is spending without the data to back it up. A business approached us about a new website, complete expansion, new navigation, new content, new page layouts, migration to a new CMS, new theme, etc. We told them the budget for the entire project was $75,000. Sounds great in theory, right? Are we willing to invest? Yes. Do we have the budget? Yes. Do we know what the end result will be? Yes. But they looked at us like we were crazy when we asked them the following question: “Do you have the data to back up the changes you’re trying to make?” Are you running tools like Hotjar to see how these proposed changes will impact existing inquiries and the actual user data behind the only source your sales team is currently using for leads?
The answer was no. When the heatmap was overlaid, guess what happened? Well, they were building a new navigation to replace the old one. Almost 90% of their traffic was coming to two pages on their site directly from the navigation, and they originally wanted to remove those two pages. In this case, it was not only about having money, but also about making sure that the decisions they were making with their budget were based on real data: user data, sales data, marketing data, etc. The more information you have by closing the data loop, the better the end result will be.
Related: Want to improve your decision-making skills? 5 steps to improve data-driven business decisions
4. Modern marketing channels to drive growth
Perhaps the most costly is using outdated channels with no measurement capabilities. Companies have focused on traditional marketing channels for the past decade, but are switching to digital. Their growth to date has relied on trade shows, print, postcards, online magazines, etc. When asked what ROI each channel has brought, very few companies can give you a concrete revenue figure or say it’s increased brand awareness. Some budgets are over $50,000-$100,000 spent on these traditional methods, but with no ROI. And yet companies continue to do it.
When the pandemic hit, we saw a surge in businesses that were once only on-site moving to digital. Lockdown changed everything. No more trade shows, no more door-to-door visits, no more people receiving mail and faxes every day. Traditional sales channels became difficult and outdated, forcing a new level of openness to get the job done in new ways. In the example of an online magazine ad placement, there are many ways to capture leads. You can use UTM tracking, referral analytics, or create a custom landing page for your offer to capture leads directly. If you don’t advertise on a landing page or form, you will rely solely on your online publication for leads and analytics. In some cases, you may see a list of just the names and no emails to follow up, or a random number of visitors to your page and no names at all. When publishing or using traditional channels, it is important to know what they offer for reporting and tracking. As a rule of thumb, use connections and tools that leverage old-fashioned methods with technology and don’t blindly spend on channels that you can’t measure.
Don’t waste time, energy, and revenue on these blind spots – there are simple solutions so you can avoid them and focus on growing your business.