Prospecting – Consistency and Persistency is Key

This was a tough year for many companies as we all faced business challenges and used the word “pivot” often. With the uncertainty of marketing budgets and whether companies were closing their doors to working in the office, no one knew how long these adjustments would last. Many companies reacted quickly and, in turn, swiftly cut marketing budgets. However, this was exactly the time to either remain consistent and continue marketing efforts as usual (albeit, likely with a different message that relates to the current business climate) or perhaps, increase the marketing budget because there is a good chance that competitors were cutting their own budgets.

We have learned from past recessions and challenging economic times that companies who remained consistent with their marketing efforts and who kept their budgets intact were far more likely to see growth over the next 5 years than those who acted quickly to cut their budgets and reduce their marketing efforts. In fact, those same companies who chose to cut and reduce faced a long 5 year recovery process.

I work with a client who is a B2B lead generation and appointment setting company and luckily their business remained steadily busy throughout the pandemic. Their clients, old and new, recognized this fact and the value of consistent and persistent prospecting.

Here at the AMA, we concentrate most of our education on the marketing side of business and not the sales side. I thought it would be interesting to share two blogs that I wrote and talk about prospecting and other consistent efforts that should always be in a company’s business plan.

The Value of Continuity of Lead Generation Activities in a Challenging Business Environment

If you want to be one of those companies who see a steady sales growth over the next 5 years, keep prospecting, keep marketing, and continue regular communication with current customers, past customers, and prospects. It is your chance to take a challenging business environment and turn it into an opportunity. Read the full article.

Prospecting Now is Important – 5 Other Actions to Prioritize

Consistent prospecting is absolutely important, but it is also vital to include other sales and marketing efforts to find the perfect balance between new customer acquisition and customer retention. Because it does cost more to acquire new customers (5-7X more!) than to keep loyal customers in your portfolio, finding the right mix of new/old customers, prospecting/retention efforts, and the proper level of human/technology resources for these efforts are fundamental to sales and business growth. You need to be thinking about customer retention, customer reactivation, database cleanup and lead qualification (especially when there have been a lot of changes like layoffs and company reorganizations), among other initiatives. Read the full article.

Pivoting your company during challenging times can mean shifting a percentage of efforts like increasing customer retention and reactivation efforts from new customer acquisitions. Or it can mean putting forth a bigger effort towards new customer acquisition or taking the time to clean up your database so you can do a big sales push when the business climate has improved. However the key is to keep these efforts going. A stop/start strategy will likely put you well behind those companies who had a “business as usual” strategy, even if it means adjusting that strategy to the next normal.

Anna Brice is the VP of Programming for AMA Phoenix, the Principal at Pinnacle Peak Marketing and a guest blogger today.