In my work as a fractional CMO, I am often helping small businesses navigate the transition from sales-driven revenue to marketing-driven revenue. This is no small feat, because of the time and investment it takes.
I just had lunch with the managing partner of a $5MM services firm. He was telling me how hard it was to ask his partners to spend money on marketing – and he was talking about $20K, which was a fraction of what they would need to really become a marketing-driven company. Why were his partners dubious? Because the ROI was not going to be fast or definite enough.
Compare that with a strategy meeting I was in last week for a $10MM services firm in which a partner – who was one of the biggest skeptics of marketing 2 years ago – said, “If we hadn’t invested in marketing over the last 2 years, I’m not sure we’d still be here today.” (To his credit, he was a skeptic, but an open-minded one.)
Let me tell you something that marketing agencies have a hard time telling you: the ROI of marketing almost assuredly looks terrible for the first 12 months you’re doing it. And may look terrible the second 12 months.
But if you’ve made the right investments in that time, you almost assuredly will be reaping the rewards of your marketing machine by your third year. And they are rewards that are beyond the scope of anything you could have generated with a sales-driven strategy. In other words, marketing can get your business to the next level – but it’s going to cost you.
It’s not easy for leaders to invest in something that is unproven and takes 12-24 months to start paying off – especially given the “black art” nature of marketing, which means that you can never really “arrive” at a marketing strategy that you can lock in and forget about. Each company’s marketing recipe is different. There are generalizations you can start from, but at least 1/3 of those generalizations will be wrong.
Why “waste” all that money marketing, then? Because building a marketing machine is like driving a car instead of pedaling a bike. If you’re happy biking and it takes you where you want to go…great. Stick with your sales-driven approach, and don’t bother building a marketing machine. But if your market is getting more competitive, or your customers are more price sensitive, or your buying cycle is getting longer…that bike probably isn’t going to be enough anymore.
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