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.

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.

Webinar: Crafting Products and Services to Reduce Time-to-First-Dollar

The Problem: Prospects Sit In Your Pipeline Too Long

Many service providers often have a single, all-inclusive service that’s presented as a binary choice: hire us for the whole service or don’t hire us. Because these services are typically important and consequential (e.g., wealth managers help save for retirement, lawyers defend against lawsuits, architects design bridges, …) prospects are typically in no rush to make a decision. They like kicking the tires to be sure you are the right guy or gal and your firm is the best choice for such an important decision.
The end result is prospects sit in your pipeline too long.

Targeting & Reaching Your Fastest Prospects

Of course, one of the primary goals of marketing is to move prospects through the sales pipeline as quickly as possible and a tried and true marketing strategy that does this is to define, target and reach your fastest prospects: those who most need you, when they most need you (aka,  “lowest hanging fruit”).
Importantly, this focus on fastest prospects accelerates and improves the performance of all lead generation marketing tactics: advertising, email marketing, content marketing, networking, all of them perform better when targeting prospects at the precise moment they have the most critical need for your service.
For example, one of the fastest types of prospects for a wealth manager is middle class, middle-aged people who have just received an inheritance: they probably don’t have a current wealth manager, know much about investing and are highly motivated to put their new money to work for their retirement.
Employing Content Marketing and SEO tactics, you could (1) write a blog post titled “What to Do and Not Do with an Inheritance” (a subject that these prospects would probably be very interested in) and (2) work to have it rank well in search engines so that it’s easily findable and widely available.

Reevaluate Your Offerings

A more fundamental approach to reducing the time-to-first-dollar would be to take a fresh look at your services from a Product Marketing perspective (product marketers are responsible for designing, creating and managing profitable products and services):

Here are two proven product marketing strategies that minimize time-to-first-dollar for service businesses (and that product businesses use all the time):
New services for your fastest prospects: do your fastest prospects need different services than the ones you have now?  If you developed new ones specifically for them, would they buy even faster, pay more, be more loyal, etc.?
Unbundle your all-inclusive service to make it easier to become your customer: can you unbundle your service to create simpler, more focused services so there’s less of a barrier to doing business with you? These new entry point services should be less expensive and consequential and should ideally provide a natural upgrade path to the rest of your services.
For example, the first thing a wealth manager typically does with a new client is to create a financial plan. What if instead of insisting they sign on for all your wealth management services in order to get a financial plan, you spun out a new standalone, financial planning service?
There will be more prospects for this new entry point service and they will move much faster through your pipeline because: financial planning can be marketed using traditional lead generation techniques like advertising and is a lot less risky than investment management (the most you can lose with a bad financial plan is its fee, unlike bad investments which can ruin lives).
Importantly, financial planning creates many opportunities for a wealth manager to show off their skills, intelligence and trustworthiness and creates a natural upgrade path. If they’ve been suitably impressed with the development of their financial plan, they will turn to you to implement the plan.

Takeaways

1. Focus on targeting & reaching your “fastest” prospects: those who most need you when they most need you.
2. Develop new services for your “fastest” prospects
3. Unbundle your all-inclusive service to create tiered services with upgrade paths. The entry-point service should be less risky and require less commitment & dollars

Sales Renewal Can Help

Sales Renewal is working with all of our clients on refining their business and marketing strategies for the Covid era. Whether it’s shortening the “time-to-first-dollar”, implementing minimal contact sales and marketing programs, creating alternatives to traditional  face-to-face marketing, or revamping communications to earn trust, contact us to learn what we can do for you.

The Case for Marketing Investment – Especially During Tough Times

We’ll admit: this is an uncomfortable subject to raise. Many of the people reading this will fall into one of two groups: (A) marketers who are struggling, in many cases because marketing budgets have been slashed, and (B) business operators who are up against the wall, many of whom see “severing a finger to save the hand” as the best available option.
Source: theclikk.com
For businesses that have experienced the need to cut nonessential spending due to the losses caused by the pandemic, marketing is usually one of the first areas to go. However, taking a deeper look sheds light on why investing in marketing is a good idea, if possible,  during tough times.
The Harvard Business Review found that companies that cut marketing costs faster and deeper than their rivals later have the lowest probability (21%) of pulling ahead of the competition once times improve.
If your business slashed its marketing budget, take time to look at the sources and reasoning in this article to think about bringing it back. Keep in mind that anything that is put off now, will need to be rebuilt later. Being able to adapt your marketing to the post-COVID will benefit in the long run, since your new strategy will already be built out.

Webinar: Considerations for Adapting Your Business and Marketing Strategies for the New Normal

The New Normal for Business and Marketing Strategies

As businesses around the country try to assess what’s next after the big Shut Down, many are realizing that it won’t be “business as usual”, not just because of the reopening guidelines imposed by the government, but because customers and clients may not feel comfortable reentering the same old economy and now have a brand new set of expectations around service delivery.
Major brands are highlighting their contactless, distanced ways of doing business, even if they’re not so different than they were before. Pizza Hut promises that once your pizza comes out of the oven, the only person who touches it is you; we hope that this was true pre-Covid as well, but conveying that sense of comfort is important these days.
Leading-edge service delivery models, such as purchasing a new car online, may have been targeting early adopters pre-Covid, but are suddenly becoming mainstream. Drive-by document signing is now an accepted way of closing a deal. Even voting by mail is gaining traction since people are wary of physically entering crowded places.

How Will You Adapt?

There is no doubt that the key to winning back customers in the new normal is trust. Trust that you, as a business, understand your customers’ concerns and are doing everything in your power to keep them safe.
While some businesses may need to address fundamental operational and human resource processes, much of adapting your business to the new normal revolves around messaging, positioning, and communication (such as the Pizza Hut example.) In other words, around marketing.
First, show your customers you are doing the right thing. Keep your premises (including parking lots, entrances, and lobbies) spotless and common spaces delineated for distancing. Provide PPE for all employees and ensure they wear it to show your organization is not cutting any safety corners. Enforce all scientific and medical recommendations for safety and physical distancing — not just because it’s the right thing to do but also to signal to employees, prospects and customers that you take their safety seriously.
And then, tell them. Build trust by making sure clients and customers know and understand you’re doing what you can to keep them safe. Messaging, positioning and signaling in the new normal should focus on health, safety, and well being.

Professional Service Firms

Professional service firms have particular challenges in this pandemic environment because of their historic reliance on face-to-face marketing tactics (e.g., networking, events, seminars) which desperately need to be updated for a minimal contact world.
Even more challenging is their tendency to have a single, all encompassing service that is critically important to their prospects, presented as a take-it-or-leave-it offer, which results in very long sales cycles (e.g., signing up for a wealth management service is a very consequential decision so prospects are very careful and take their time).
To shorten the time-to-first-dollar,  we recommend “unbundling” services to create tiered offerings that build on each other and provide a natural upgrade path. More on this can be found in Crafting Products and Services to Reduce Time-to-First-Dollar.

Sales Renewal Can Help

Sales Renewal is working with all of our clients on refining their business and marketing strategies for the New Normal. Whether it’s shortening the “time-to-first-dollar”, implementing minimal contact sales and marketing programs, creating alternatives to traditional  face-to-face marketing, or revamping communications to earn trust, contact us to learn what we can do for you.

New Normal After Coronavirus: 3 Changes Businesses Will Need to Adapt

Commentary: Government intervention, a contact-free economy, and automation will all define the new normal.

Source: fortune.com
Now that many of the worst-affected states are beginning to reopen their economies, we are all realizing that the post-pandemic world will be very different than it was just a few short months ago. We can expect increased government intervention as a result of the huge stimulus and bailout payments, and greater emphasis on promoting “an economy that serves all Americans”. According to the authors, the seismic shift to a contact-free economy will be seen in three areas in particular: digital commerce, telemedicine, and automation. All businesses need to rethink their business models and the name of the game is resilience. Companies will have to build, or strengthen, backup and safety plans, step up succession plans, and expand work-at-home capabilities. The good news is that the authors also anticipate some positive outcomes as a result of these changes. Sales Renewal is talking to a number of our clients on how they can adapt their businesses for success in what is being called the new normal.

The Big Shift: A Prediction of What’s to Come Post-Pandemic

Change was coming all along, but the coronavirus has expedited a number of key facets of consumer behavior.

Source: www.ama.org
While the cultural shift during the pandemic has been tremendous, there are many facets that are likely to become the new normal for businesses and their marketing strategies in the future.
Businesses should not look at this time as a temporary normal that they can come up with some quick fixes for, but as a permanent shift for the future. There will be a new way of doing things and the business models and marketing strategies will be different – it’s already changing every day.
With people staying at home more often than ever, virtual has become the new standard. Video calls and online communication are more normal and saving consumers time, setting them with a new expectation of how they can communicate with companies and firms. For example, having a video meeting with a professional service instead of visiting their office, can be more convenient and efficient for a consumer – something they might want to keep doing in the future.
The reality is that people are developing new ways of doing things and new expectations are being set. Many companies will need to have a substantial online presence to meet their consumer’s needs. Is your business in line with adapting to the new virtual landscape of consumer behavior?

How Chinese Companies Have Responded to Coronavirus

7. Prepare for a faster recovery than you expect.

Source: hbr.org
Well worth the read; here’s a sample:
4. Reallocate labor flexibly to different activities.
For example, in response to a severe decline in revenue, more than 40 restaurants, hotels, and cinema chains optimized their staffing to free up a large share of their workforces. They then shared those employees with Hema, a “new retail” supermarket chain owned by Alibaba, which was in urgent need of labor for delivery services due to the sudden increase in online purchases. O2O players, including Ele, Meituan, and JD’s 7Fresh followed this lead by also borrowing labor from restaurants.
5. Shift your sales channel mix away from face-to-face towards new channels
For example, cosmetics company Lin Qingxuan was forced to close 40% of its stores during the crisis, including all of its locations in Wuhan. However, the company redeployed its 100+ beauty advisors from those stores to become online influencers who leveraged digital tools, such as WeChat, to engage customers virtually and drive online sales. As a result, its sales in Wuhan achieved 200% growth compared to the prior year’s sales.