[No Budget? No Problem!] Improving your marketing and sales without spending money

Since 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has grown to impact virtually everyone on the planet, more and more of us have turned to the internet in search of information, local news updates or to check up on friends and family near and far and as we make our way through 2022, this does not seem to be changing just yet. Many of us are working from home, which most likely requires us to be connected online. There also seems to be an influx of content, advising businesses that they should be investing in digital marketing during this time to try and generate sales momentum during this difficult time. I've seen countless posts suggesting businesses should be building new websites and continuing full SEO or social media activities.

For the record, and before I continue, I'm not fully against this approach. After all, Nexa as a growth agency provides these services and like many competitors, have been impacted by the crisis. But at a time when businesses clearly need help, perhaps a more sensible approach would be the offer of help to optimize existing resources at a fraction of the cost of developing new assets.

There may well be companies who are unaffected by this who are willing to invest in a new website - my team and I have spoken to a few this week. The reality, however, is that most businesses are looking for real genuine advice in the knowledge that they can't possibly standstill and which, perhaps doesn't involve them spending vast amounts of money.

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No Budget? No Problem!

Most of what I suggest below is focused on B2B businesses but if you're a B2C business that relies on online leads and enquiries, then the advice below will also help.

Before I start, let's agree on the following:

The role of digital marketing is to primarily generate brand / product / service awareness and to generate leads.
The role of sales is to convert these leads into closed delas.
The role of your digital assets (i.e. Website, Mobile Apps, Social Media channels) is to host marketing content that can help to generate leads and to nurture prospects into sales.

If we look at the above points and interpret them as different stages of the sales process, it would look something like this (again, very simplistic):

Stage 1 - Create and run digital marketing campaigns

Stage 2 - Drive traffic to your website or social channels

Stage 3 - Generate sales leads

Stage 4 - Follow-up with sales leads

Stage 5 - Send proposals and provide timely follow-ups

Stage 6 - Close deal

Here's an example of how this works:

Your digital marketing efforts drive 1,000 people to your website or social channels.

3% of those converted into a sales lead

So we now have 30 warm leads, which are passed to your sales team for follow up. From the 30 warm leads

Your sales team disqualify 25% of these due to reasons such as limited budget, incorrect products or services, poor-fit clients. This leaves us with 22 prospects that have been sales qualified.

The next step is to send out proposals to each prospect.

33% convert into a hot lead because they have responded positively to what's been sent to them. That leaves us with 7 hot leads.

From the 7 hot leads, your sales team manage to close 30%, which provides you with 2 new customers.

From the initial audience of 1,000 top of funnel leads that entered your website or social media channels, your business converted 3 of them. This equates to an overall conversion rate from traffic of 0.2%.

A couple of things to consider here. If your product or service costs $10,000 and the cost of traffic is equal to $5,000 ($5 per visit), your return on investment from this marketing activity will look like this:

Revenue = $20,000
Marketing cost = $5,000
Marketing ROI = 400%

Many companies would be happy for a marketing ROI of 400% - after all, this seemingly represents good value for money.

But there's a massive danger of looking at numbers like this without looking at ways of improving them. Between the top of the funnel (1,000 visitors) to the bottom of the funnel (2 sales), there are many steps that are taken by your sales team AND sales prospects to get through the funnel that impact the end conversion. These include:

The prospect going onto your website, browsing your content and being interested enough to complete a form or call your business
The quality of the sales follow up from the initial enquiry
The speed, personalization and quality of the proposal sent
The post-proposal follow up
Price and negotiation
Contract terms and conditions

do more wth less All of the items above can play a significant part of the conversion process but the measurement of these elements are often overlooked by companies.

We strongly believe that if companies are willing to work on optimizing processes as well as sales and marketing collateral, the impact on conversion can be significant. With the current COVID-19 crisis and self-isolation for many, businesses are now finding more time than was previously possible, which can allow them to focus more on internal business improvements and for those willing to engage in this activity, the below can help.

So, here are 3 simple tips that if implemented, will almost certainly increase conversion, revenue and marketing ROI - at zero initial cost:

Tip 1 - Create more engaging content on your website to attract more leads. What kind of content or messaging can you showcase on your website that will attract more interest from visitors? If you and your teamwork on different aspects of your website, the impact in conversion could be significant.

Cost = $0

Tip 2 - What does your sales follow-up look like? Could it be better? Is there a fixed and clear process for this? If not, consider creating very clear instructions for your sales team to follow. How quickly should they follow up after receiving a lead. Common sense suggests that the faster you follow up with a lead, the greater the chances of success. So think about using follow-up templates or scripts that simplify the follow-up process for your company.

Cost = $0

Tip 3 - How good are your proposals? When was the last time you looked at one of your sales proposals in the eyes of a potential customer? When did you last update your proposal templates? The chances are that neither of those items has been addressed recently and the likelihood is that your proposals are either PDF or PPT files that largely talk about your business rather than your prospect's business. Consider updating your proposals to address the needs of your prospects and also think about using better, more modern and trackable technology if you really want to drive sales efficiency.

Cost = $0

The impact on conversion

Let's look at the same traffic of 1,000 visitors to your digital assets:

With better, more engaging and interesting content, conversion to lead increases from 3% to 5%.

We now have 50 leads to pass onto the sales team

Because of the increase in the quality of your website content that better educates prospects, disqualification rates decrease from 25% to 20%.

That leaves us with 40 leads who now require a proposal

Your proposal quality is now significantly better and more customer-focused. This means more people are interested in working with your company and hot leads increase from 33% to 40%

We now have 16 hot leads for the sales team to close

Assuming a slightly higher closing rate of 40% for the 16 hot leads, you will generate 6 new clients. That's triple the number of new clients for doing nothing other than simple amendments to your sales and marketing collateral.

The impact on revenue and ROI:

Revenue = $60,000
Marketing cost = 5,000
Marketing ROI = 1,200%

The examples above are clearly a simplification of reality but demonstrate well how small changes to commercial resources and assets can impact your business.

As part of our Sales Enablement offering, our team help companies to create sales processes, sales assets together with sales and marketing aligned strategies to help you generate the maximum possible return from your commercial activities. Despite being top-tiered Google Premier Partners and Facebook Partners, we never push clients to spend vast amounts of money on media and advertising. Instead, our initial focus is always on analyzing internal processes and optimizing assets for better performance. Only once we're satisfied that a client's assets are optimized for performance will we consider investing in media to drive additional traffic to a client's digital assets.

Here's a case study that shows the impact on revenue for a client