Now, Right Now, Is the Time To Invest And Build A Stronger Company

The sun has been shining on remodeling. Between a booming economy, high consumer home equity, and a generally rosy outlook for the construction industry, business has been good.

It’s during these times of plenty that managers often take their foot off the gas of their sales and marketing engines. There’s plenty of work to go around, right? I’m not going to try to convince you that you need to keep that engine revved to the max because many firms have more work than they can handle. However, I am going to make the case that a good year is the absolute best time (and often the only time) to strengthen and learn about how your sales and marketing operations really work – because it is.

While Others Take A Break, You Can Position Yourself to Thrive In The Next Downturn

Markets are cyclical; they go up and down over time. Right now we’re up, but what goes up must come down. At some point, probably not too long from now, we will almost certainly head back down. Leads will become fewer and more expensive. Sales will become more competitive. Margins will become thinner.

In those kinds of tough environments, it’s really, really hard to learn about what works in your sales and marketing operations for one simple reason: you can’t afford to be wrong. You have to direct all of your resources to getting leads, closing sales, and keeping the lights on. There’s little time or money to experiment, creativity becomes too risky, and a bad bet could mean having to lay people off – or worse.

However, now, most companies can afford to invest in their futures, learn about what really drives their sales and marketing operations, find new ways to be more efficient, and take some good risks in search of higher, long-term rewards. Imagine what would happen if you ran some tests and found that 30% of your marketing spend is being wasted, and you could get by with much less. This kind of waste is probably happening right now in most companies – but they don’t know it because they’re usually too worried about losing leads to cut it and find out.

What would you do with 30% of your marketing spend returned to you? Test some new lead sources with good potential? Put it on the bottom line? Upgrade equipment and other capital assets? Maybe you can put it to market research to make sure you’re at the top of the pile when the next downturn comes.

Now is the time to ask the tough questions and get the right answers before they become critical to your company’s survival.

NOW IS THE TIME TO BE BOLD.

Here are a few ideas to get you started:

1. Cold Turkey Split Testing

Pick a lead source where you think you’re not spending very efficiently today. Make sure you know how you can measure its’ effectiveness in your particular case, measure it for a month to get a baseline if you haven’t already, and stop it cold turkey for the next month.

Seriously, just stop, in whatever way makes the most sense. Don’t trim it back by 25% or even half and expect to measure it that way. Redirect funds into another source if it makes you feel more secure, but you should have a strong enough marketing program that you can turn off any given lead source for a period of time without causing major harm, especially in this environment.

If you can’t stop a lead source for a month and be OK, you probably have more risk in your business than you realize.

If the lead source involves people, retask them for a time, give them professional development work to do, have them do community service which you can use for social marketing, etc. Retasking can be done without creating major waste. Or, if that isn’t your cup of tea, just move the people (like a canvassing team) to a totally different area that you can measure separately.

Measure what happens, and now you can clearly see what impact that lead source really has on your business from a dollars and cents standpoint. Now, pick 2-3 different ways of doing it, run each for a month at the same time, and measure again. Compare your baseline, cold turkey, and tests against historical results, say year over year, and against each other. Pick a winner and roll with that for the next quarter.

Please note that this test is harder to do with some forms of advertising because it has a tail of results on it. You can’t just stop TV ads for example and actually see the effect within 30 days. In those cases, see idea #2.

2. Change Your Creative – A Lot.

If you can’t quit cold turkey, or if that seems too risky, try meaningfully changing your ad or website creative by testing 2-3 different versions to see which produces the best results.

For this, you will need to have a way of tracking each version. Maybe you will use trackable phone numbers, direct people to microsites, put a coupon or promotional codes in your creative, etc. However you do it, make sure you can track both old and new as accurately as possible, or the results are meaningless.

To make this happen, brainstorm with your team about some things to try. You can get into new slogans, new images, different layouts, messages, promotional strategies and so forth.

Do something radically different. If you are always using promo discounts, try brand messaging, or bringing the funny. If you’re knocking on people’s doors, try a new script or approach you’ve never tried before. Train part of your team before the launch and compare results for 30 days.

The options are limitless, and sometimes you’ll find really successful new ways of doing things that translate into MAJOR efficiencies and huge profits down the funnel.

Despite all of the guru’s telling you that you need to stick with their system, and only their system, verbatim, perfectly, forever, or you will certainly die a horrible death… there is huge room for innovation, and you can either own it, or be the victim of someone else leap frogging you.

3. Cut Your Advertising Budget By 25% Or More, And Redirect The Funds To Getting Better

Market research like surveys and focus groups will tell you what you need to work on, and what kinds of things people really value. Marketing automation like e-mail marketing returns enormous ROI in many cases, and can drive results throughout the funnel. Invest in some digital marketing help to spruce up your website, make some new landing pages, get some new organic content that will generate high-quality FREE leads for you for years… and more.

Here as well, the options are limitless. Any savvy marketer knows that content is driving most of the leads from lead aggregators like HomeAdvisor. They sure aren’t knocking on doors. Why can’t you do that too and get those super-low cost leads yourself? You can – most people just haven’t done these things much either because they don’t know how, or they are too busy advertising to get leads TODAY. In either case, in today’s market you can solve both of those problems. You can afford to get better for the long run by renting the expertise you don’t have in-house.

If you don’t like any of those, think about sales enablement. What would help your sales team close? How about a slick presentation deck that explains who you are and why homeowners should trust you delivered on a nice, big, bright iPad Pro? What about investing in hiring the best people you can find to replace some of your “C” players? What about investing in training for sales management to better lead your teams?

There are a million different ways you could be getting better right now to make yourself stronger, more efficient, better connected to your customer, and more able to thrive in a tougher environment. Let your imagination run, but don’t wait. Commit to investing in your future now, because we all know that courage evaporates as risk increases.

You can’t afford to not take some smart risks right now to position yourself for future success. I guarantee you that your smarter competitors have already started.