Almost every small business fixes marketing first. It is the most visible problem, it is the easiest thing to buy, and there is a queue of people happy to sell it to you.
It is also, in most cases, the wrong thing to buy first. Here is the arithmetic.
The bucket with a hole in it
Say you get forty enquiries a month and convert eight of them. Twenty percent.
You spend three thousand a month on advertising and it works: enquiries go from forty to sixty. At the same conversion rate you now win twelve jobs instead of eight. Four extra jobs for thirty six thousand a year.
Now do it the other way. Leave the spend alone and fix the funnel so that nothing arrives and dies unanswered, and follow-up continues after you have forgotten. Conversion goes from twenty percent to thirty, which is not an ambitious number when the starting point is enquiries being lost rather than declined.
Forty enquiries at thirty percent is twelve jobs. The same result, for none of the ongoing spend.
Then add the advertising on top and you get eighteen.
Why this keeps happening
Because a lost enquiry leaves no record. Nobody sends you an email saying “I contacted you on Tuesday and gave up on Thursday”. The failure is silent, so it never makes it onto the list of problems, while a quiet month of enquiries is loud and obvious.
We have audited a business with more than a thousand recorded enquiries and almost no deals created against any of them. The leads were fine. Nothing in the system created a next step, so the work evaporated on contact.
The order that works
- Funnel. Stop losing what you already have.
- Back office. Get paid for what you already did.
- Inbox. Answer faster than the business next door.
- Front door. Give the traffic somewhere worth landing.
- Demand. Now buy more, because now you can hold it.
- Morning page. So you can see whether any of it worked.
This is the order the install runs in, and it is not a preference. It is the order that stops you paying for enquiries you are not yet able to keep.
The one exception
If you genuinely have almost no enquiries, and you have checked rather than assumed, then demand does move up. But check first. Most businesses that believe they have a demand problem have a funnel problem wearing a demand problem’s clothes.
Twenty minutes with this checklist will tell you which one you have.
