Are you an insomniac business owner?

Are you a business owner not sleeping due to cash flow worries?

As a fellow business owner, I don’t have the perfect answer, but the following might give you some ideas to focus on at 3am! My experience is once you do that everything gets clearer and easier and an answer normally appears.

When times are hard and cash is squeezed the age-old battle between Sales and Marketing flares up. Who is the most important? Which should have the share of the limited budget?

It is bad enough in an SME with may be a team of 4 marketing staff and a hungry sales team of 10 and egos get bruised but in smaller businesses the battle is harder fought, and the consequences can be fatal.

Many smaller businesses where there are only one or two decision makers will tend to take shorter-term, knee-jerk reactions to cash flow. Marketing will often be seen as an expense that can be removed. Sales fall back on the “Eat what you kill” mantra.

The problem is the World is not that simple. Marketing feed sales and sales lead to growth needing more marketing to generate the demand etc. It is an ever-increasing argument of Chicken and Egg and which comes first sales or marketing!

As a business owner I have experienced several major events over the past 20 years ofr more which have taught me that small movements and a shift in weight and emphasis is the best way to react and any knee jerk or decision to close off spending and “ride out the storm” is normally the worst thing you can do. This approach has got my business through banking squeezes, closures due to regional flooding (including my business premises being wiped out) and of course pandemics when the business went into it 95% dependent on food and hospitality work.

The knee jerk approach to curl up like a hedgehog and blame everyone else is only human and for a short time may even be appropriate but you must keep moving forward. Think positive. What can you do and control and forget things you cannot control or influence.

Most people can start to shave budgets in a crisis and “cut down” rather than “cut out” and as we all know certain things must be paid every month regardless. With marketing seen as a “variable” cost by many the risk is to turn spending on marketing off. Do not!  Marketing spend is as important as paying your rent.

It is no accident that any Sales course talks of pipelines and funnels and continually uses plumbing as an analogy.  If sales are coming though a pipe and cash is what comes out the end the reality is that marketing is the pumping station getting the water in to the pipe in the first place, Just as we all have to pay our utility company you should treat marketing as an essential overhead that is to be paid for along with your rent and mobile phone bill if you want to be in business more than the length of time work takes to get through your waterpipe. If you do not then you will run out of cash very quickly and the business will die. A businesses need cash as importantly as humans need water!

So, if you agree marketing is a constant need in order to generate for sales tit is a question of looking for marketing value. Just as with utilities there may be a better value deal out there you can switch too. Just as with Utility companies there are experts out there who can find you that best value deal.

Notice I said better value and not cheapest. In life cheap is often cheap for a reason. e.g. a certain magazine may be cheaper to advertise in but if your target audience does not read that magazine, you will still have no sales (or at least less). A better approach is to hit the same audience as before but in a more efficient way. Also do not fall in to the trap that we are talking about advertising. All advertising can be said to be marketing but marketing is far more than just advertising spend. There are lots of way to market your business.

The process needs research of you business market, thinking laterally and being prepared to consider new ways and new suppliers. You need to start a plan!

There are a other things you can do. You can “shorten” the sales pipe and make it faster (often referred to frictionless) making it easier and faster for clients o buy from you; producing the cash faster does reduce the overall amount of cash you need to survive.

What you need is to start planning your marketing as a cornerstone of the business. A marketing plan is not complicated and ned not cost a fortune in a small business as it defeats the object. Our plan is on one piece of A4. It identifies who our target is, what we offer them and teh channels we communicate that with some monthly ad weekly objectives to help measure the effectiveness. When it starts to fail we adapt the plan and move on. It is a living document. Believe this simple point. Market right and the Sales ( and cash) will come. if they dont come your marketing may need changing!

The old rule is "Fail to Plan; Plan to Fail" but may be here is a new twist

"Fail to Market; Fail to sleep"

#marketing #vaadhoomedia #business #cashflow