How To Overcome The Plight Of Feast Or Famine Sales
Successful business owners all get to the point where they've got the basics of the business down, and are now looking to become more sophisticated in marketing and sales. They want to work smarter, not harder to create regular, reliable revenue and a pipeline of right-fit clients, but how do they get there?
Successful business owners all get to the point where they've got the basics of the business down, and are now looking to become more sophisticated in marketing and sales.
They want to work smarter, not harder to create regular, reliable revenue and a pipeline of right-fit clients.
To do that, they need a customer acquisition system. Not a bunch of pieces and parts.
They need a program that is organized along the modern customer journey. One that creates inbound leads and improves conversion rates.
But how do they get there?
First, you try DIY Marketing Development
They enroll in a training program, read books on the topics, and attend educational webinars.
Maybe they actually create and implement a campaign.
Then they get busy.
No one follows up with the campaign they launched.
Months go by before they get around to this marketing development project again.
Eventually, you decide to hire help.
They try a team of freelancers and then quickly create another job as nothing really happens without their energy and effort. That works ok until they get busy.
They hire full-time marketing help. But if there is no established marketing program in place, this person ends up becoming the “catch-all” role spending the majority of their time on tasks that are hard to measure efficacy.
If business development is doing a good job then marketing talent is often 75% focused on proposals. That works ok until they start losing more than winning deals, or your best proposal writer gets wooed away by a competing firm. When this happens, business owners find themselves and their teams marketing by committee instead of marketing an actual plan.
Each of these approaches leads to inconsistent marketing and therefore feast or famine sales.
These scenarios are so common that many people believe this business reality is normal and, therefore, the only regularity they create is the inability to consistently hit revenue targets.
So what’s the paradigm shift that most independents and small business owners need to make if they want to eliminate the feast or famine cycle?
They need to evolve from lone wolf marketer to systems marketer.
Business owners, like wolves, are social, pack animals.
Yes, some of us are introverted, and many see marketing as a necessary (evil) means to a desired end.
Wolves do not leave their pack to be alone. They leave to find a mate, new territory, and start their own pack.
Nor do people start businesses to be alone.
They start them to solve a problem or create an experience for other people.
What is the benefit of joining a pack?
A support system.
The value of support
A support system gives the independent more bandwidth.
No longer having to do everything alone, the individuals can start to prioritize their contributions around their own gifts, talents, and abilities.
What will ultimately determine the success of this new pack?
The standard rules by which the system operates.
The importance of a system
Without a system, no one else will know how to contribute to their gifts, talents, and abilities or identify their successes. They are left to march along to the beat of the lone wolf, and that is just not going to last very long.
This can be said for the business as a whole, but when it comes to feast or famine sales the problem is twofold:
Not enough support to both generate and complete a sales cycle.
No repeatable process to run.
A systems marketer is different from a lone wolf marketer, not by how fast they scale or how many people they employ, but instead, by the culture, they create for their brand to thrive.
Remember, your brand is not who you think you are. Your brand is who other people think you are.
You can’t control what they think, but you can influence them by how you show up and share your value.
If you don’t know how to do that in a consistent and reliable way, an outside consultant is your first step.