Does this sound familiar?
Sales have slowed down. You start to worry and decide to focus all your attention on generating and closing leads.
You post more on social media, call previous enquiries, email your list with a new offer, and attend local networking groups.
It works—leads start coming in again, your pipeline looks healthy, and you're winning some great new clients and projects. Happy days!
Now, you need to onboard these clients and deliver your service. There’s no point in winning new clients if you can’t make them happy! But there aren’t enough hours in the day for you and your team. Something has to give. With plenty of leads now, you drop the activities that generated those leads to focus on delivery. Sounds sensible.
A month later, you realise you haven’t closed a new deal or received any new enquiries for weeks.
Oops. You start posting more on social media, call previous enquiries, email your list with a new offer, and attend local networking groups.
And the cycle begins all over again…
This feast or famine cycle in small businesses is so common. Most businesses won’t have an in-house dedicated marketing and sales function, so it often falls down to the owner to drive sales. I see it all the time with clients, and I have most definitely experienced it in my own business.
These peaks and troughs are just not helpful to you or your business. We want to drive consistency in your sales and delivery functions. It will create a better experience for clients and potential clients, remove much of the stress and worry for you, and create a far more profitable business.
Here are four areas to work on to flatten the feast or famine cycle.
Know Your Numbers
Have a really strong understanding of what your sales, profit and cashflow look like. Building out a forecast that gives you clarity on what you need to bring in every month means you can create a level of accountability around your sales and what will happen if this drops.
In your forecast, you should calculate the volume of sales and marketing activities you need in your various funnel stages to deliver the number of new clients you need.
For example:
- If you need to bring in sales of £10,000 and your average revenue per client is £1,000, then you know you need 10 new clients.
- You convert 50% of your proposals into new clients. So you need to send 20 proposals.
- You convert 25% of your enquiries to proposals. So you need 80 new enquiries this month.
- Your website converts traffic to enquiries at 5%. So you need 1,600 visits to your site.
Your funnel will look different from this, but it gives you an idea of how your forecast can help focus your sales and marketing activities.
Time Management
Parkinsons’ Law tells us that work expands to fill the time available. This means that we often find “urgent” work taking up all of our time and leaving nothing available for the important work.
We want marketing and sales to be important all the time. But not urgent. In feast or famine mode, it becomes urgent. In a controlled, even flow of business, it is important.
The distinction between important and urgent in terms of time management is vital.
The best way I have found to find the time to work on sales and marketing is to block it out in my diary every week as a non-negotiable. It goes in my diary before any meetings or other work and does not get moved!
Explore techniques like the perfect week or default diary to help you stay on top of this.
You should have a list of pre-planned activities coming into your protected sales and marketing time. You should have a target of how many social posts you will create, how many sales calls you will make or how many videos you will record. Don’t get to this time in your diary without a clear action plan.
Reporting and KPIs
If you know your numbers, then you know whether things are going to plan or not.
The important thing here is to look at the predictor KPIs that will give you an early warning as to whether you will hit your sales target or not.
Without this in place, the first and only real sign that things are not going to plan is when the sales have not closed, and it’s too late to do anything about it.
Set up KPIs at the earliest stage of your funnel. In the example I gave above, I would be keeping a very close eye on website traffic. If the traffic isn’t there, the rest of the funnel will not deliver what I need.
Set up the reports that make it easy to track these numbers, and make sure you are looking at these regularly.
Flexible Capacity
The flip side to the issues caused by feast or famine is its impact on your ability to deliver the service.
Suddenly, having an influx of new clients to onboard can be tough if you want to keep standards high.
Sales are never entirely predictable, but there are a couple of things you can do to try to help.
Look at whether you can create a flexible portion of your workforce, with freelancers or outsourced team members, to create additional capacity when needed.
When you are in feast mode, create a waiting list for new clients and spread the timeframe for which you onboard them. A waiting list combined with future onboarding slots gives you a lot more control over the speed and quality of new work.
About the author
Luke Desmond
Fractional CFO for Tech, eCommerce & SaaS. CEO @Crisp_Acc provides virtual finance functions. Co-Founder @getvaulta SaaS Startup for accountants.