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Small businesses, like most mortgage, debt, or insurance companies struggle to do all the things necessary to provide stable revenue. Most are only a few people and everyone wears a variety of hats, from accounting to sales to marketing. This makes it hard to do any of it well.
This is the challenge. How do you get predictable revenue out of a business that is constantly juggling priorities and focus? One thing is for sure–consistent revenue requires steady approach to marketing and sales.
Sales is Probably Your Expertise
My guess is that your expertise is sales. That’s where you should be focusing most of your efforts. It doesn’t work out that way does it?
You work your leads hard, but cold calling and prospecting can be a lot of work for little gain. Most sales people end up spending too much time hunting. This process of directly prospecting, touching every person just to see if they are interested, is very inefficient.
What you need is a little marketing to bring in warmer leads.
Marketing Can Be Neglected
Unfortunately, what you need is getting neglected. This happens for one of two reasons: You don’t know how to get started or you simply aren’t that good at it.
This neglect send you into a panic when the sales pipeline gets low. Then even the little bit of marketing that you do pull off gets done poorly. Again, resulting in too much effort for too little results.
Both Marketing and Sales Need Consistency
Your efforts constantly jump from marketing to sales as your pipeline goes from empty to full. Unfortunately, your revenue goes through the same volatile cycles. You need to find a way to smooth out these gyrations.
The key to predictable revenue is predictable marketing and sales. Aged Internet leads can help.
Since most marketing and advertising is designed as a broadcast it can be very expensive–random direct mail, newspaper ads, or cable spots. The advantage of aged Internet leads is that you get the professional lead generation and targeting of real-time Internet leads, but at a steep discount.
This can steady your marketing efforts and keep you focused on selling to qualified sales leads.
