12 Ways Service-Based Businesses Can Take Advantage of the Holiday Season

The Young Entrepreneur Council has some advice for service businesses and how they don't have to sit on the sidelines during the holiday shopping season.
It's no secret that product based businesses can get a lot of attention and extra sales during the holiday season. Because of that, professional services can often overlook the opportunities for a boost in revenue during the shopping season, but there are different tactics and strategies to implement that can help them get a “piece of the pie” too. Read on for some examples offered by Entrepreneurs that service-based businesses can implement for the holidays.
Read the full article at: smallbiztrends.com

Coronavirus: How small businesses can boost holiday sales in 2020

Many consumers will do most of their shopping with local retailers. Small businesses need a digital plan to stay close to customers amid coronavirus pandemic.

Nearly seven in 10 small businesses see the winter holiday season as a top sales opportunity for their business, according to The Visa Back to Business Study – Holiday Edition. Small businesses have already faced unprecedented challenges in 2020, and the holiday season appears set to bring plenty of its own, amid a shaky economy and continued concerns about another wave of coronavirus infections. Read more to learn what all small businesses should focus on to ensure a successful 2020 holiday sales season.

Read the full article at: www.cnbc.com

5 evolving marketing strategies for the COVID-19 holiday season

This year, with so much uncertainty due to the pandemic, many marketers are wondering how to evolve their strategies for a holiday season that will be like no other. The marketing strategy that was right just a couple of months ago isn’t anymore.

Results from a new Adobe study of 1,000 consumers aims to help marketers understand how to prepare for what buying habits are ahead:

1. 75% of shoppers are keeping with their holiday traditions but there'll be less demand for new brands
2. 40% of consumers are looking for “distraction marketing” – messages that take them away from Covid realities; especially for Gen Z & Millennials
3. With few places to go, 70% of consumers are saving more than they did pre-pandemic and most are looking for marketing that helps them find a good deal
4. Buy online/pickup in store continues to grow at a staggering rate: 259% in 12 months

Read the full article at: blog.adobe.com

Sales Renewal Launches Strategic Marketing Consulting Practice

Businesses Turn to Sales Renewal to Create Strategies that Drive Success

Concord, Mass.—Oct 20, 2020—Sales Renewal, building on the success of its outsourced marketing offering, the JointSourcing Solution™, is pleased to announce the launch of its new, standalone Strategic Marketing consulting practice.
Since its founding in 2009, Sales Renewal has been offering JointSourcing (“joint venture” + “outsourcing”), a unique, one-stop marketing solution that shares risk & reward and provides everything a small business needs to grow its revenue and brand. This includes a fractional CMO for marketing strategy, a VP of Marketing for day-to-day marketing management, and all the people and technology required to create their custom marketing plan and then implement and manage it under one-year contracts.

Strategic Marketing Is in Our DNA

Resolving critical, strategic challenges has always been a focus for JointSourcing clients and overcoming them, a key driver of their success. Due to recent market demand, Sales Renewal is pleased to offer its Strategic Marketing expertise and experience to any business whether they are interested subsequent JointSourcing implementation and outsourcing or not.
Strategic Marketing is challenging because it overlaps many diverse disciplines that have their own consultants with narrow, specialized expertise: marketing tactics for marketing agencies, business strategy for management consultants, sales strategy for sales consultants and product/service strategy for product marketers.
Marketing agencies, for example, are usually ill-equipped to address deep strategic questions because they are more experienced working on short term, tactical projects where such questions do not often arise. Management consultants, meanwhile, have the opposite problem: they tend to focus on devising strategies without much consideration of the cost effectiveness of the tactics required to implement them.
“Sales Renewal has always been a bit unusual because the core of JointSourcing has always been about getting the fundamental strategies right,” said Keith Loris, Sales Renewal’s president & CEO. “We have always understood how critical the underlying strategy is to determining ultimate marketing success. That’s why Sales Renewal has developed the diverse expertise, wide ranging experience, and well-honed processes that Strategic Marketing demands. It is also important to realize that our recommended strategies are not Big Enterprise strategies; instead, they have always been informed by our real-world experiences running marketing programs for small business clients with small business budgets.”

Strategic Marketing Can Assist Clients With:

About

Since 2009, Sales Renewal has been offering JointSourcing, a unique, outsourced marketing solution that shares risk & reward while providing everything a small business needs to grow its revenue and brand: a fractional CMO for marketing strategy, a VP of Marketing for day-to-day marketing management, and all the people and technology required to develop, implement and manage your custom marketing plan. Importantly, JointSourcing employs a shared risk/reward business model, which, thanks to its pay-for-performance aspects, aligns its economic interests with its clients. Sales Renewal’s Strategic Marketing Consulting practice builds on JointSourcing’s many years of success.
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Sales Renewal’s Strategic Consulting Service Helps Law Firm Pivot with New Business Model

Sales Renewal is often asked to help clients wrestling with challenging strategic decisions, whether it’s adjusting their business and marketing strategies to their new Covid realities (something that has unfortunately become way too common), reducing their time-to-first-dollar from prospects in their pipeline or devising a go-to-market strategy for a new product or service they’re considering.
This video, for example, discusses Sales Renewal’s work with Eno Martin Donahue & Roth LLP, a 130-year-old law firm with offices in MA and NH, that needed a go-to-market strategy for a new service idea that had three ambitious goals:

1. Changing the way small and midsize businesses think of, and engage with, their attorneys.
2. Growing the firm’s outside general counsel business (lawyers who perform the strategic & legal functions in-house attorneys do in bigger enterprises); a recurring revenue stream highly coveted in the transaction-heavy legal business.
3. Structuring the new service so that the attorneys did not have to “sell” it (which they loathe doing).

Many small business owners are not aware of the benefits that having a closer relationship with a business attorney can provide and the uncertainty around cost—and fear of a running meter—prevents most from ever reaching out.
Working closely with the partners at Eno Martin, Sales Renewal helped flesh out and shape their vision for a new subscription-based legal service for small and midsize businesses. The result, My Outside General Counsel (MOGC), is designed to make it easy & affordable for business owners to benefit from ongoing legal & business counsel, a strategic capability formerly limited to large enterprises.
With Sales Renewal’s help, MOGC was developed into a formal program with a variety of clearly defined benefits and costs, transparently laid out at MyOutsideGeneralCounsel.com. Four different tiers of service, each with increasing monthly benefits, allow business owners to choose a tier based on their legal needs and budget.
Unlike other legal services websites, MyOutsideGeneralCounsel.com is completely transparent about the program, how it works, what is included at each level and most importantly, its fees. By combining an abundance of information on the site and explaining how MOGC leverages the common and well-understood “freemium” web business model, prospects readily understand this new service, thereby shortening their time in the pipeline.
Since lawyers are, by nature, reluctant salespeople, the logical progression the model presents to simply slide to a different tier when it becomes clear that more work is needed, means clients don’t need a hard sell to recognize when they need to move up.
Listen to Keith Loris, President and CEO of Sales Renewal, talk with David Yas of Podcast617 to learn more about how Sales Renewal worked with our client to successfully develop MOGC, from concept through launch.

CEO confidence rebounds, fueled by decreasing pessimism, improving prospects for revenues [Q3 2020 Vistage survey]

Signs of life in the economy and an increase of business activity has led to an increase in confidence of small and midsize business CEOs. The Vistage CEO Confidence Index rebounded to 82.8 in Q3 from 62.5 in Q2.
Source: myvistage.com
Factors that contributed to the rebound from last quarter include (#5 is a doozey):

1. 32.5% improvements in revenue expectations
2. 29.2% improvement in profitability expectations
3. 28.3% increase in investment plans, largely driven by a significant decline in contraction
4. 25.4% improvement in workforce plans
5. 10.1% improvement in expectations for the U.S. economy – from 93% of CEOs being pessimistic to 83% (still a worryingly high number)

How to Evolve Your Digital Marketing Strategy in times of CoVID-19

The following list of strategies and tips, compiled by our online digital marketing training team, will help your company navigate CoVID-19 limitations.

Source: www.yourdmac.com

The ability to adjust your marketing strategy to meet unexpected demands or market conditions is the hallmark of good management. During these continued times of uncertainty, when every day brings new challenges, it can sometimes be difficult to see the “strategic” forest for the “tactical” trees that seem to need our attention every day. Sales Renewal works with our clients every day to ensure we keep an eye on the forest, ensuring that the underlying strategy is sound enough to weather this storm on multiple fronts, including digital strategies. Read more in this article by DMAC about how your online presence should adapt during the Covid era.

Despite Economic Uncertainty, Small Businesses Are Gaining Optimism

CEO confidence in their businesses is growing despite economic uncertainty, according to the July Vistage/Wall Street Journal survey.

Source: www.vistage.com
We’re going to start posting this WSJ monthly of Small Businesses each month.
The WSJ spun the July report as significant improvement but there’s a glass half empty/full aspect to it.
Yes 75.% is a great improvement in confidence over 44.7% but it’s still DOWN 80% from where it was in Feb.

Q2 2020 North American M&A Report | PitchBook

M&A activity in Q2 2020 continued to decline as COVID-19 remained an unrelenting problem in North America, and especially the US. Nevertheless, certain sectors are seeing pockets of stable dealmaking.

Source: pitchbook.com
M&A activity in the second quarter of 2020 continued to decline,  with $336.8 billion over 2,025 transactions. This is a substantial decline from the record activity seen in recent years which the report calls “the canary in an M&A coalmine.” Quarter over quarter declines were 41.1% and 24.2% for deal value and count, respectively, compared to an already slow Q1 2020.

More Customers Are Shopping Online Now Than At Height Of Pandemic, Fueling Need For Digital Transformation

The trend shows that online shopping growth isn’t going away and that brands need to re-assess their digital offerings to create the best experience possible.

Source: www.forbes.com

Research is showing that even though stores and restaurants are slowly opening back up, shopping and ordering food online have continued to rise.  

If your business doesn’t have an online presence or any way to offer your services online, now is the time to begin building out ways to reach your consumers better and conduct your business virtually. The road to getting back to normal is still a long one, so attempting to wait it out and avoid transitioning may hurt your business and cause you to lose clients. 

Business owners should be confident that their website is easy to navigate and offers clients what they need. Whether it’s selling products or services, scheduling online appointments or delivering resources, your website should be a good alternative to conducting the same business as you would in person. If it isn’t, consider making the decision to transition and contact Sales Renewal to see how we can help make you more reachable to consumers online.