5 Terrible, Horrible No Good Marketing or Sales Headaches Competitors Hope You Have

Getting a headache every time you look at your top line?

If you’re getting a headache when you look at the how your investment in marketing and sales had impacted your top line, or if you can hear the faint sounds of your competitors snickering somewhere in the distance, then it may be time to identify the culprits and get some pain relief.

Let’s look at the top 5 culprits and what you can do to make these go away.

1. Your Company is Not Getting Enough Visibility in Your Market(s)

Visibility is the gateway to building company and personal brands, as well as generating leads. The four sure signs that you don’t have the type of visibility that you need are a low number of site visitors, infrequent or non-existent mentions in local business and industry trade publications, not enough leads, and a low number of social media fans, followers, and friends. 

Increasing your firm’s visibility requires a combination of investment, perseverance and faith. There are a huge number of strategies and tactics available for increasing visibility from search engine optimization to creative public relations and a lot more.

2. You’re Not Generating Enough Leads

Lead generation is more than just having a “Contact Us” form on your website. The reason these types of forms don’t work as well as you might wish is that most of the visitors who come to your website or who you bump into at a networking event just aren’t ready to buy.

In a recent survey of staffing and recruiting firms, generating leads was rated as the number one top challenge by survey respondents. Over 75% report that lead generation is either extremely challenging or challenging.

 You need to consider that there are three types of leads.

Top of the funnel leads are designed to capture prospects at the beginning of their journey and are generally educational in nature. Middle of the funnel leads are designed to showcase solutions to prospect issues with an emphasis on your firm’s solutions. Bottom of the funnel leads are built for attracting prospects who have explored their issues and solutions, and who are now looking to hire a company to help them implement a solution.

It’s important that you build a lead generation strategy that covers top, middle and bottom of the funnel lead generation opportunities. 

3. You Need to Close Leads Faster

You may be fortunate in that you have sufficient lead flow, but pained by the fact that your close rate is low or that you’re just not closing leads fast enough. The root of this pain may be a poor lead nurturing program.

According to Forrester Research, companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales leads at 33% lower cost per lead. Data from HubSpot’s 2017 Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics cited that 67% of B2B marketers say they see at least a 10% increase in sales opportunities through lead nurturing, with 15% seeing opportunities increase by 30% or more.

If lead nurturing is a headache, then it’s time to investigate technology that automates the lead nurturing process. I’ve written a series of blog posts on marketing automation that provides a good basic overview of the strategies, tactics, tools and technologies that create a strong marketing automation capability.

4. Competitors are Poaching Your Clients 

Losing clients is inevitable, and it’s likely that your competitors that have a sales staff or business development team are actively seeking to poach your clients. They’re looking for nooks and crannies in your client relationships where you’re not performing or just not paying attention, and then widening those cracks until your client leaves.

We have a couple of tough questions. Do you have a dedicated client relations strategy ? What are you doing to delight your clients to create the strongest possible loyalties?

We think you’ll find when you explore the issue of client retention that it’s just not about price … it’s about value and having an “always be helping” firm culture.

5. Your Marketing and Sales Efforts Aren’t Performing Up to Expectations and you Don’t Understand Why

If you’re investing in marketing and sales, but aren’t happy with the return on your investment and don’t know the reasons why, then it’s time to build, measure and monitor selected metrics.

There are a significant number of technologies and tools that will let you measure the performance of everything from how productive your sales team is to how effective your email efforts are. In fact, there are so many possibilities for what to measure and how to measure your sales and marketing program’s effectiveness, that it’s possible to be paralyzed by indecision.

Our guidance: start with identifying a few key performance indicators and build from there. 

Connect With Us

If you’re suffering from any of these headaches – or if you want to capitalize upon your competitors’ headaches, give us a call or connect with us here.

We welcome an opportunity to help you build your top line to new record levels!