Editor’s note: Paul Girffiths is the founder of Client Advocates. They help owners of MR and Insight agencies to “grow revenues by implementing proven growth strategies.”
You must have clarity about four key aspects of your commercial strategy. When you can answer these four questions, you can develop a brand building and sales activation plan that will deliver growth.
Be proactive and spend more. Brand building and sales is an investment in your business and while there is risk associated with investment, there is also return!
Make sure you are consistent and resilient in the way you spend – little and often will give you a more long-term brand building impact than a big one-off splurge! And also consider that you can achieve very significant growth with very little spend. A clear brand building plan, targeting the right audience with a clear set of messages, material and content backed by a smart sales activation process can be highly effective at generating inbound and outbound leads. The audience should be both new and existing clients and you should reuse and repackage the materials and content multiple times. The activation process could be using LinkedIn and/or e-mail.
Build your marketing and sales technology platform.
You can do it for next to nothing –-by which I mean less than £1,000 per year –- with free or very rudimentary versions of CRM systems, LinkedIn Sales Navigator and some e-mail integrations.
Use this platform to leverage your content – brand build, activate sales and give the business belief that marketing and sales are productive and effective growth engines by bringing in leads.
And then ask for more budget to broaden the scope of what you are doing — throw in some webinars, a client event, more content, etc. –- so that you can up the intensity, maintain consistency and gain even more momentum.
I think it’s a false dichotomy – you should do...