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Behind the Scenes of a Killer Customer Reactivation Campaign Resource of the Month: Prezi Meet Brandon How to Virtually Guarantee You’ll Hit Your 2017 Growth Goals How a Business Setback Can Become a Success Finally! A Guide to Modern Customer Service Good News
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Marketing Mistakes That HURT Cash Flow and Business Growth
flow is sometimes a problem, and 41 percent of businesses surveyed said cash flow was a consistent problem. To be fair, this study didn’t publish any additional info about the business owners — for example, did all of these businesses have less than a million dollars in annual revenue? If so, I would assume those businesses would have greater cash flow issues than a group of businesses with over a million dollars in revenue. For the sake of this story, let’s assume this is accurate (based on my experience of working with small businesses, it is pretty close). How do you fix a cash flow issue for any business? The interesting thing is that, in the vast majority of cases, your marketing is linked to cash flow issues. The mistakes many entrepreneurs are making with marketing, sales, and business growth in general are the very same mistakes that are causing the cash flow issue. On a side note, it is also possible that
I am often confused by the decisions that entrepreneurs who are normally very smart make when it comes to marketing, sales, and growing their companies. It’s as if logic flies out the window and emotions rule the day when we start talking about sales and marketing. Of course, I’m not suggesting entrepreneurs need to be perfect and never make a mistake — in fact, I personally made one of these mistakes last year in my business. My issue is with the entrepreneur who doesn’t realize when they are screwing up and who continues to let their mistakes hurt their business’s long-term ability to grow. I recently read a study that looked at businesses’ cash flow. This study found that only 12 percent of businesses never have a cash flow issue. That means 12 percent of businesses can consistently pay their bills, pay themselves, and have profits left over. On the flip side, 47 percent of businesses say that cash
someone just has a crap business model that isn’t scalable, but that’s an article for another day. The First Mistake: Not Investing In (or Ignoring) Your Current Customers I’m going to start us off with the marketing strategy that is most near and dear to my heart: customer retention. You don’t have to use a newsletter to grow and maintain retention (although that is a good idea ), but you do have to do something , and that something needs its own budget. Retention is not a portion of the marketing budget. Without customers, your business is worth just about zero. The reason so many businesses struggle to grow is that they
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