When you are having a poor sales month, it isn’t because of work you have or haven’t done this month. It’s the work you did or didn’t do three to four months ago when you were flat out with work that is the issue.
I was invited to be a guest on a podcast recently and the host asked me how business was. I told him that I was flat out and had little/ no capacity for new business. He asked why I wanted to do a podcast to raise my profile if I was flat out.
There were two reasons:
I want to continue to educate as many small businesses as possible to make better decisions – my purpose
I want to continue to market my business so I build a pipeline and have choice
Let’s ignore the first one for now. That’s a whole different 60 Second Snippet.
If you don’t have the ability to keep marketing when you are busy or you feel you don’t need to, then your income and cash will be a constant rollercoaster. Great one month, poor the next.
Most business owners (B2B) I chat to typically have a three to four month ‘burn time’. Burn time being the time from initial engagement of a prospect to them agreeing to work with you. That means that the work you put in this month (March) will generate income for you in June or July.
Your income in March, April & May is determined by the marketing you did in Q1.
When we are working with clients on their business planning, a key part is ensuring that there is a marketing plan, a team and a system in place to keep marketing regardless of workload. This ensures a consistent flow of leads into the pipeline that you can choose how you communicate with/ manage.
You never know when a customer will stop working with you (by choice or not).
You never know when you will choose to disengage a customer.
You never know when you may have excess capacity.
Having a healthy pipeline gives you the ability to engage new clients when you need to and choose the ones that align with you on values, investment and partnership.
Keep marketing, even when you are busy, unless you like the months where revenue and cash falls off a cliff.
