You’ve upgraded your marketing – now what?

Your Allies guest blog from Jonathan Peachey, Metis

If you’re in the enviable position of already having marketing up and running, the leads starting to flow in, turning into new clients – then you may now be facing the challenge of how to deliver more work. How do you manage that growth? What processes do you need to take you from leads through to the delivery stage? Our colleagues at Metis have a few sound ideas about how to tackle this. Read on…

How’s your working life going? Are you finding that either you’re flat out delivering work or you’re desperately looking for more to do? We’ve seen feast and famine in many businesses. Getting the balance right is really tough. It’s because businesses don’t have enough information.

Under-8s soccer

Blaming feast and famine on lack of information seems a bit of a stretch. Especially when it looks like an under-8s soccer match, where everyone rushes around the pitch chasing the ball.

But we’ve seen this many times, including with the consultancies we serve at Metis, and we know that to get a steadier stream of leads and business through the door, you need to make the right decisions. And that depends critically on information.

Running hot and cold

For example:

• To decide whether sales need to go faster or slower, you need a live view of the amount of work that will be delivered over the next, say, 3 months.
• That information also affects resourcing – run too hot, and you’ll need to be planning ahead to bring in temporary or freelance staff. Lose sales momentum, and you may have people sitting around doing nothing.

And not all client work delivers the same profit. Let’s say that your marketing activities are bringing a constant stream of leads. If you know which projects and clients/customers are most profitable, you might decide to use the new business to replace less profitable accounts, rather than try to keep selling to them.

We usually find that the consultancies we serve actually do have all the information they need. The problem is it’s squirrelled away in spreadsheets and systems that don’t talk to each other and get out of sync.

We couldn’t find a ready-made solution for that when we ran our own businesses, so we built one. Metis’ award-winning cloud software brings together sales tracking, resource management, job financial control, timesheets and expenses. Because all the information is in one place and is up to date at all times, it can give you answers immediately, taking the drudge out of information-gathering and cutting the risk of taking decisions based on partial or conflicting data. It’s quick and easy to set up and use and comes with a high ROI.

Playing like champions

Now your people can play like the champions they are. You’ve picked the right formation, based on the team’s availability and what you know about the profitability of each customer. You can go out and market yourselves without feast and famine to contend with. The right software will be a foundation for growth and a means to get rid of the clutter of spreadsheets.

This, of course, is where marketing agencies like Your Allies come in. They can advise on all the different ways you can reach your target audience, and how to use each one to its best effect. And you can do lots for yourself, with services such as HubSpot.