Use Emojis to Let Your Partners Know Your Firm's New Business Situation

Do You Know Where (and Why) Your CPA, Consulting, or Law Firm Should Invest its Marketing and Sales Budget?

I think I’ve come up with a new way to help marketing and sales teams communicate the status of the firm’s new business efforts to owners and partners: using “marketing emojis.”

Now, in what amounts to a blink of the eye, you’ll be able to initiate the types of conversations with partners you’ve only dreamed about in the past, along with an easy-to-understand way of identifying the marketing and sales initiatives (and funding) you need to get the ROI they demand.

It starts with this strategic map that categorizes 4 different possible situations describing what leads and sales look like in your company right now. Here’s your User’s Guide to this map:

Too Many Leads / Too Many Sales

This emoji lets your partners know that your firm has no marketing or sales pain whatsoever, and in effect, you have reached a state of new business nirvana. You have brilliantly cracked the code. In fact, if abundance is your pain, it may be time to cut back on marketing or sales spending. Why spend more until it’s necessary?

If any firm has reached this status, please contact me here so I can feature you in a book.

Too Many Leads / Too Few Sales

If you send this emoji to your partners, you’re telling them that you’re doing a momentous, herculean job of putting leads into the sales pipeline, but that for any one a number of reasons, those leads are not converting to sales.

The reasons for this can range from marketing delivering poor quality or undernurtured leads, to partners dropping the ball, to a lack of alignment between marketing and salespeople, or even a lack of critical infrastructure like a CRM system. Improvements–and investments–to bring this to a situation where more leads are converting to more sales, may involve a deep dive into the world of sales enablement.

Too Many Sales/ Too Few Leads

This is not a bad place to be in, and sending your partners this emoji lets them know that while improvements in the firm’s new business program can be achieved, that achievement needs to be done in a way that new leads that come in need to be of the highest quality.

It’s a question of whether your firm wants a huge number of leads of varying quality, or a handful of leads of high quality. The strategy here is to have an agreement on the difference between a prospect, a marketing qualified lead, and a sales qualified lead, and an understanding that only sales qualified leads are sent on to partners. It’s the responsibility of marketing to separate the wheat from the chaff and manage the process of moving someone from prospect to marketing to sales.

Check out this blog post for on this: Not All Leads Are Created Equal.

Too Few Sales/ Too Few Leads

This is not a good place to be. And frankly, doing nothing or willfully ignoring this emoji may not be a prudent course of action for the health and well-being of your firm or your career. Of course, there’s a good chance that your partners’ risk aversion and tight-hold of the firm’s purse strings are the catalysts for why your firm has reached this less-than-lofty status.

A prudent course of action if this is your emoji might be to restart with a clean slate. That has to include abandoning the marketing and sales assumptions and perceptions you currently hold. One of the reasons you’re experiencing too few sales and not enough leads is likely due to those assumptions and perceptions.

With a tip ‘o the hat to Nobel Laureate Dylan, “…the times they are a changin’.”

You’re On Your way to a New Emjoi-driven Style of Communications

Now, you can send an email to your partners with a subject line like, “Status of our Spending on Marketing and Sales.” Copy and paste one of the emojis in this blog and one that says “call me.”

That will look like this:

And when they call, you can have a discussion about what you really need to make marketing and sales work in stronger and better ways for your firm. Then, it’s up to you to make a decision and a commitment to change.

I strongly recommend that this start with education and insight, like understanding what marketing infrastructure you’re missing, how to get leads with thought leadership, or what data you need to really understand what’s working and what isn’t.

This may be a simple way to communicate, but I have a lot of confidence that it will help to stimulate the type of conversation about marketing and sales that your firm needs to have.