A few postings back, I recommended that companies think twice about severely reducing marketing spend and laying off some or all of their marketing department in the face of current economic uncertainties.
Unfortunately some companies had no choice in the matter and had to make some hard decisions concerning people. In these exceptional times, when even the experts are unable to agree on how long or how deep this recession is going to be, a judicious tightening of the purse strings seemed to make sense.
The problem is, hacking into your marketing budget creates both a short- and a long-term headache for your organization. Neither of which is desirable.
Short term it reduces, or even shuts down, the output of your lead generation machine. This leaves your sales team with fewer leads to work on, which in the current climate is exactly the reverse of what you want. Especially as sales cycles on existing opportunities are being stretched out further and further and further.
Longer term, once you decide to loosen the purse strings, there will be a significant lag time before you can begin to feed new leads to your sales team again. This is because the well thought-out and effective marketing programs that you recently chopped off at the knees took a good while to develop and implement, and a lot of hard effort to optimize. Getting back to the enviable position you were in before you made those budget cuts simply won’t happen overnight.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to kick-start the economy by convincing you to go into massive rehiring mode. I understand you can’t justify that. I just want to bring your attention to the fact that most worthwhile marketing programs don’t deliver instant gratification. So whether you believe things are going to recover later this year, or early next, you need to be thinking about breathing some life into your more critical marketing programs (like inbound lead generation) at least three months in advance of your expected recovery date. And, don’t worry. You can do this without going into rehiring mode, with all the baggage that’s involved. Just use contractors.
There’s an abundance of very competent marketing talent out there right now, only too willing to fill in for you until you reach a point where it makes sense to hire for full time positions again. Many of these marketers, like myself, offer a wealth of experience, talent and know-how that is available on tap, as and when you need it. And, so long as you use their services judiciously, you’ll spend way less than you did to keep one or more full time members of your marketing staff on the payroll.
An added bonus of course, is that you get to test drive a few different individuals that might just turn out to be good candidates for a full time role, as and when you are ready to move back into hiring mode again.
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Sean O’Donovan is the owner of FunnelBuilders, an internet marketing consultancy that helps technology organizations develop and implement post-click marketing strategies that generate actionable in-bound sales leads - www.funnelbuilders.com