Business Growth Strategies For CEOs: Top CMOs On Marketing Strategy Implementations

3 Ways CEOs are Maximizing Recovery Impact with Least Investment

Written by Pete Hayes | Thu, May 14, 2020

As my partner, Art Saxby, is fond of saying, “The best marketing takes no marketing dollars.” What he means is that the stuff that makes marketing work—and work most efficiently—is done before a dollar is spent. After working with nearly 1,000 mid-market CEOs to capture or recover growth, here’s what we’ve learned:

1st Way: Ensure Execution Tactics are Aligned to our Strategy

CEOs all want growth, or more pertinently, we all want recovery. But how do we do it most effectively? Or, to the point of this article, how do we do it most cost-efficiently? The way to get the most efficient execution requires a sound strategy so that when we are ready to execute marketing programs, we don’t waste our money on things that aren’t strategic. We also want to be able to answer these questions:

  • Do I know how much I’m willing to invest to acquire my next customer? (in our business it’s $5,000). Can I break down this acquisition cost to know what I’m willing to spend to get a prospect? (need to know what percentage of prospects become customers)
  • Do I have the people, budgets, and systems I need to have an impact and capture my opportunities as they emerge? Is my sales team ready? Does my website and CRM make me competitive and responsive? Do I have someone with the right experience to oversee it all?

(But wait, I said the best marketing takes no marketing dollars! Wait for it…)

2nd Way: Make Strategic Decisions that are Informed by Data

So, if we’re following, in order to make the 1st Way above viable, we’ll need a killer recovery strategy. Our focused game plan is everything. And we’ll want to answer these questions:

  • What hills are we planning to take? Do we know how our customers’ needs have changed and how we will respond? Are we targeting new kinds of customers?
  • Does our pricing and packaging of our offerings reflect our knowledge of what’s different? What’s new, fresh and relevant about who we are and why our customers should care?

(These are the decisions to be made that are most impactful to our recovery strategy – and they may not require us to spend a nickel! But to make them most effective, we’ll need to be fully informed and current on how our market dynamics have shifted.)

3rd Way: Ensure Your Insights are Current and Thorough

Everything has changed. We know it. We read about it. We see the sky falling on one horizon while rays of hope and opportunity shine from another. This is NOT the time to trust our gut, but to quickly assemble a knowledge base of data from which to make our strategic decisions above in the 2nd Way.

  • Have we taken inventory on how our markets and competitors have changed, and how that affects us? Do we have data?
  • How have our customers been impacted? How have their economics changed? Their buying behaviors? Have we looked beyond our historical markets and channels for insight into broader possibilities for our company?

Okay, you’ve made it this far, and likely recognize that these three “ways” are in reverse order. While most businesses begin and end with a focus on execution tactics, the road to having the greatest impact with the least investment requires that the “execution” be aligned with the recovery “strategy,” which is informed by the latest market “insights.” Following this 3-part set of cascading questions will result in more powerful, better informed, and thorough preparation for developing and executing your recovery plans for greatest impact, with the least investment. We’ve built our business on it. Perhaps this same process will be useful for you.

For more information, please see our 12-step Pre-Recovery Checklist here.

 
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