MarketStar Blog

Key Takeaways

• According to a CNBC survey, top CFOs predict that a recession will hit in the first half of 2023.

• Several effective and creative strategies can boost revenue and improve financial decision-making during a recession.

• Maintaining open lines of communication with all your stakeholders, including employees, vendors, and customers, is crucial for managing your business during economic uncertainty.

• You can make your business even smarter by replacing people-driven processes with technology, which frees your employees to do higher-order thinking.

As we face an increasingly uncertain future, businesses must learn to build resilience in their operations to weather any potential economic storms.

This means preparing for the worst while remaining optimistic and agile enough to take advantage of any opportunities that may come up.

In these challenging times, businesses must think long-term and build resilience against future economic downturns.

As we’re all aware, economies are cyclical – what goes up must come down. And while we can’t predict the future, we can prepare for it.

So, how can B2B marketers build resilience during an economic downturn? This blog post will explore key strategies to help your business weather the storm and be better prepared to overcome any financial challenges that come your way.

Planning for an Economic Downturn

It’s no secret that the world economy is heading toward a downturn.

And while it’s impossible to predict precisely how long it will last or how deep it will go, it’s important to be prepared for a worst-case scenario.

If you’re a business owner, now is the time to take a hard look at your operations and ensure you’re as lean and efficient as possible. This means cutting unnecessary costs, streamlining, and tightening your processes.

It’s also important to have a good handle on your cash flow. Make sure you have a solid line of credit in place in case you need it and consider stockpiling some cash reserves to tide you over in case of a prolonged downturn.

3 Cash Flow Management Tips During a Recession

One of the most important things you can do during a recession is to manage your cash flow carefully.

This means knowing how much money is coming in and going out and adjusting your spending as needed. Cash flow management is about managing your business finances responsibly so there’s enough cash to grow.

It can be a tricky balancing act, but it’s essential to keeping your business afloat during tough times.

Here are a few tips for managing cash flow during economic uncertainty.

1. Cash Flow Forecast

A cash flow forecast is a key tool for business owners to use to manage their finances during a recession.

By forecasting your cash flow, you can make informed decisions about allocating your resources and ensure that your business has the funds it needs to weather the economic downturn.

There are a few things to keep in mind when creating a cash flow forecast during a recession:

• Be conservative in your estimates. It’s better to overestimate your expenses and income and have too much cash than to be caught short.

• Remember to include one-time expenses in your forecast, like layoffs or downsizing.

• Revise your forecast regularly as the recession progresses and your business’s needs change.

With a cash flow forecast, you can manage your finances during a recession and help keep your business afloat.

2. Manage Your Accounts Receivables

During an economic downturn, businesses can face increased pressure to manage their accounts receivable.

This is because when customers have less money, they are more likely to delay payments or default on their debts. As a result, businesses must be proactive in managing their accounts receivable during a recession.

There are a few steps businesses can take to manage their accounts receivable during a recession.

• First, they can offer discounts on early payments. This will incentivize customers to pay their invoices sooner.

• Second, businesses can extend payment terms to give customers more time to pay their debts.

• Third, businesses can provide financing options which will allow customers to pay their debts over time rather than all at once.

3. Improve Communication

When a recession hits, it’s more important than ever to focus on strong communication between teams, stakeholders, and partners.

This is because, during a recession, there is typically a decrease in business activity and an increase in uncertainty. To weather the storm, it’s important to keep everyone on the same page and working towards the same goal.

Here are a few tips on how to improve communication during a recession:

• Be clear and concise in your communication

• Make sure everyone is on the same page

• Hold regular meetings and check-ins

• Be responsive to questions and concerns

• Keep an open mind and listen to others

4 Effective Tips to Grow Your Business in a Downturn

The economic landscape may be uncertain during a recession, but your business can still grow. Recessions present a unique opportunity for B2B businesses to expand their customer base and market share.

Here are a few tips on how to grow your B2B business during a recession:

1. Focus On Your Existing Customers

Your existing customers are your best source of revenue during a recession. Make sure you stay in touch with them and meet their needs. Retaining existing customers will help you grow your business and build customer loyalty during a downturn.

2. Look for New Markets

Keep your growth potential open by not just focusing on your existing markets. Look for new markets that your competition may be underserving. They can offer you an opportunity to expand.

3. Invest in Marketing

A recession is a perfect time to invest in marketing. Deploy marketing campaigns to reach new customers, increase your sales, and grow your brand.

4. Be Efficient

During a recession, you must be extra careful and efficient with your spending. Marketing budgets are often one of the first areas to be cut, but this can be a mistake.

Maintaining Employee Morale is also Important

It can be hard to keep your employees motivated when the economy takes a downturn.

To maintain morale during a recession, keeping employees engaged in their work and focused on the company’s goals is important.

There are a few keyways to do this:

• Communication is key. Make sure employees are aware of the company’s financial situation and what measures are being taken to weather the storm.

• Keep employees engaged in their work. This may mean offering more training and development opportunities or giving employees more responsibility.

• Focus on the company’s goals. During a recession, it’s easy to get sidetracked. Keep employees focused on the company’s mission and what needs to be done to achieve it.

Recession-Proof Your Business

Fortune predicts that the dot-com crash is on the cards again, and all signs indicate an economic recession. Businesses need to be resilient during a downturn. To do this, they need to understand their strategies and planning clearly.

While a recession can be difficult for businesses, there are ways to weather the storm and come out stronger on the other side.

B2B companies can create a recession-resilient business by diversifying their customer base, improving their products and services, cutting costs, sales outsourcing, focusing on customer retention, and investing in technology.

Key Takeaways:

We’ve often heard the term outsourced sales floating around in multiple meetings within various verticals of all industries but seldom given any thought to what it is and what it can help us achieve.

Have you ever noticed how a good story can capture anyone's attention, no matter who they are or where they're from? Stories have this incredible ability to bridge gaps and bring people together. Whether it's a gripping news article, a touching message on social media, or a powerful YouTube video, stories speak to everyone.

Key Takeaways: 

The shift from the traditional offices to the work-from-home (WFH) setup poses an assortment of new challenges for employees all over the world. Of all the professions that require a human touch, sales come right at the top. It’s all about human interaction in sales.

Content marketing is the perfect demand generation platform, allowing you to nurture leads, enhance brand awareness, convert your visitors into customers, and increase your overall reach and sales. It is all about producing content tailored to your potential and existing customers so as to induce their behavior in your favor. 

Key Takeaways

Ad ops was quite straightforward in the pre-digital days, with media companies selling ad spots that ran during TV programming. The landscape has changed.

Key Takeaways

• AdTech allows advertisers to plan, manage, and optimize their campaigns strategically. 

• AdTech includes various tools like DSPs, SSPs, ATD, ad servers, and ad networks to help advertisers serve relevant ads to relevant audiences.

• AdTech streamlines and enhances digital advertising efforts, and the technology is only growing more sophisticated.

• AdTech enables businesses to reach audiences quickly, increase measurability, and run effective ad campaigns.

The AdTech market is full of opportunities for generating leads.

But with so many options and so much noise in the market, it can be challenging to know where to start. This guide will help you find the best leads for your business by considering your specific needs and budget.

When it comes to finding leads, AdTech can be a great option. Using data and technology, you can identify potential customers and target them with personalized messages.

In this guide, we’ll cover the following: 

• What is AdTech?

• The AdTech ecosystem

• Benefits of AdTech 

• Implementing AdTech into your lead generation strategy

• Get started with AdTech

By the end of this guide, you’ll know everything you need to get started with AdTech and find better leads.

What is AdTech?

Advertising Technology, a.k.a. AdTech, refers to the software and tools used to buy, sell, and deliver digital advertising. AdTech includes everything from ad servers and networks to demand-side and data management platforms.

AdTech is rapidly evolving and has revolutionized the advertising industry. It has made it easier to buy and sell ads and track and measure advertising campaigns’ performance.  

AdTech has also made it possible to target ads to specific audiences and deliver them in real-time.

If you’re involved in digital advertising, you need to understand AdTech – it is the backbone of advertising.

AdTech is an exciting and dynamic industry, wherein new AdTech companies are constantly emerging every day, and existing companies are continually innovating and improving their products.

The AdTech Ecosystem

 The AdTech ecosystem is an ever-changing landscape. 

With so many players and technologies, it can take time to keep up with the latest trends. However, understanding the AdTech ecosystem is essential for anyone who wants to stay ahead of the curve in digital advertising.

Here are some major players and the technologies used to power the AdTech ecosystem. 

• Ad Server: An ad server is a program that stores and serves website advertisements.

  Advertising networks use ad servers to track statistics, deliver ads, and act as a middleman between advertisers and website publishers. Ad servers can serve websites, emails, and mobile devices.

• Ad Exchange: Ad exchange is a marketplace where advertisers can buy and sell advertising space.

  Ad exchanges are used to buy and sell ads on websites, apps, and other platforms. They usually work on real-time bidding (RTB), meaning you can bid on ad space in real time. This allows you to target specific audiences, create personalized customer experiences, and optimize your campaigns for maximum impact.

• Agency Trading Desk (ATD): ATDs allow you to trade digital advertising space in real-time.  ATDs use programmatic technology to automate the ad-buying process, making it more efficient and effective.
  
  Using an ATD includes improved campaign performance, transparency, and control. They also provide you with access to valuable data and insights that can be used to inform future campaigns.

• Demand Side Platforms (DSP): DSPs are used by ad agencies and marketers to purchase ad space on digital platforms, including websites, apps, and social media platforms.
  
  DSPs allow advertisers to bid on ad space in real time, which gives them a significant advantage over traditional ad-buying methods. With DSPs, advertisers can adjust their bids according to market changes, allowing them to get the best ROI.

• Supply Side Platforms (SSP): An SSP is a type of software that helps websites and other digital publishers improve the efficiency of their ad operations. By automating many of the manual tasks associated with ad management, SSP can help publishers increase their revenues and improve the overall quality of their ad Inventory.

• Data Management Platform (DMP): A DMP is a software platform that helps organizations collect, process, and manage data.
  
  DMPs can track customer behavior, understand customer journeys, measure campaign performance, and more. They are an essential tool for any business that wants to make data-driven decisions.

The 3 Important Benefits of AdTech

AdTech can be used in a variety of ways to benefit your business.

It helps you to reach a wider audience, target your ads more effectively, track the results of your ad campaigns, and optimize them for better results. 

AdTech can also help you save money on your advertising budget, as you can more accurately target your ads to those most likely interested in your product or service.

Overall, AdTech can be a valuable tool for businesses of all sizes. If you are thinking of using AdTech to boost your business, consider the benefits carefully and speak to an expert to ensure that you use it in the most effective way possible.

There are many benefits to using AdTech; some of the most notable ones include:

• Targeted Advertising: AdTech can help businesses reach a larger audience with their ads by targeting specific demographics, interests, and even locations. The ad placement can have perfect timing and context, helping marketers save time and resources. 

• Better Performance Tracking: You need the correct information to make informed decisions about campaigns. AdTech helps report and analyze data like impressions, conversions, click-through rates, and more in real time. This information can then be used to improve future ad campaigns.

• Increased ROI: An ad campaign that isn’t monitored may cut into your campaign’s returns – using advertising technology can help automate this process. You can leverage AdTech to improve your bids, eliminate time-consuming work, increase the return on investment (ROI), and generate more revenue.

Implementing AdTech into Your Lead Generation Strategy

AdTech is a powerful tool for boosting your lead-generation efforts. It enables your business to target potential customers with ads relevant to their interests.

By harnessing the power of data and technology, you can create targeted ads that reach the right people at the right time.

AdTech enables you to understand your target audience better, what they’re interested in, and when they’re most likely to convert. By using this information, you can create ads that are more likely to reach leads who are ready to buy.

By targeting ads to specific groups of people, you can increase the chances that your potential customers will click on them and convert them into leads.

AdTech can be a great way to boost your business, but it’s important to use it wisely. When using AdTech to generate leads, there are a few things to remember:

• Make sure your ads are targeted to the right audience. 

• Provide a clear and easy “call to action” for potential customers to get in touch with you. 

• Follow up with leads promptly to convert them into customers.

Get Started with AdTech

This article covered what AdTech is and the essentials of AdTech.

There are a few basics that you should know before getting started with AdTech. Our experts can help you learn them, from choosing the right platform to understanding the jargon like ad buying, ad targeting, ad fraud, and more. 

Get in touch with us today to make the most of your ad spend, and you’ll be on your way to generating more leads and closing more sales.

Churn is inevitable in every customer-centric business – be it a darling of Silicon Valley or a daring startup in a small town. Churn usually refers to the exit of customers in a given period. It can also refer to the loss of business from an existing customer. What matters is how the company identifies and addresses it to minimize the adverse impact.

Key Takeaways: 

• Dropping dead leads and prioritizing high-value and sales-ready ones can help you gain more efficiency 

• The more control you have over your sales pipeline, the better your revenue generation 

• Combining your sales and marketing teams can pave the way for your business’s growth 

• To increase sales, provide more relevant content to your product/service and business 

• Identify and cross out possible bottlenecks in your pipeline to keep your potential customers moving through the sales pipeline smoothly 

Are your sales declining or not growing as you expected them to? The issue could be in your sales pipeline. 

Your sales pipeline is the backbone of your overall sales process and is vital to your business’s success. It delivers a stable feed of qualified leads and enables your sales team to convert those leads into valuable customers.  

However, if you’re unsure about how your pipeline is built or are looking for the best practices to build your sales pipeline – don’t worry; we’ve got you covered! 

Before we get moving, you must be clear on understanding what a sales pipeline is.  

“A sales pipeline is a visual way of tracking a potential client’s status in the sales process. It is a set of actions taken by salespeople to convert a lead/prospect into a customer”. 

According to Harvard Business Review, “there was an 18% difference in revenue growth between companies that defined a formal sales process and companies that didn’t. Businesses that adhered to best pipeline practices saw 28% higher revenue growth.” 

It is imperative that your company, B2B in particular, has a healthy sales pipeline as it enables you to: 

• Improve the entire sales process 

• Predict your business results 

• Analyze the best sales strategies for your business 

• Evaluate your company’s progress 

• Close more deals 

6 Best Practices for Building a Powerful Sales Pipeline 

We’ve listed below six best practices to help you transform the way you manage your sales pipeline. These tips can help improve your sales process and generate more revenue. Let’s explore. 

1. Define Your Pipeline Stages 

The first step to follow in managing your sales pipeline is to break your pipeline into stages and then define them. Each stage needs to be clearly defined with actionable steps for the sales reps to take.

If you haven’t created a sales pipeline yet, our experts can help you create one.

Map your customer journey by understanding how a lead moves and makes its way through the sales process.

Also, understand what your sales team is already doing. Modify the existing approach if needed and build a new pipeline for better management. 

Related Read: 4 Must Have Tools to Manage Your Sales Pipeline Efficiently 

2. Put Your Customers First 

“Never put the cart before the horse while building your sales pipeline.”

One of the biggest mistakes most sales managers and teams make today is they don’t put their customers’ thought processes first. Instead, they just build their pipeline around arbitrary decisions.

But your product/service exists only because of your customers. So, build a customer-centric sales pipeline that runs alongside your buyer’s journey.

We recommend you break your buyer’s journey into the following stages:

• Recognize the problem 

• Realize the economic impact 

• Specify decision standards 

• Check alternatives

• Select the vendor 

Each of these five stages require a specific action to be taken by your sales reps.

For instance, let’s say your potential customer has reached the fourth stage (checking for alternate sellers/vendors). They might be weighing up your product/service against your competitors. This is the right time for your sales team to quickly jump in and send a brief comparison video or a similar asset to them, which can help them sway back to your side.

Remember, these stages need to be flexible so they can be tweaked later per the customer journey.

3. Bridge the Gap Between Sales and Marketing 

Bridging the gap between sales and marketing may sound cliche or like an adage, and you just shrug it off. But, you might want to reconsider your thoughts as it is crucial for your sales team to be aligned with the marketing.

Yes, their main objective is to forward good and qualified leads. What if they don’t know what a good lead or SQL (Sales Qualified Lead) is? The very thought haunts you, right?

However, the good news is that it can be fixed by working closely with experts who can help you identify the problem, fix it, and overcome your lead generation challenges.

4. Identify & Focus on the Best Leads 

It takes about the same time to close each deal in every sales process. It is best practice to avoid getting distracted by leads that won’t move the needle.  

Instead, concentrate your time and efforts on high-value and sales-ready leads. View the activity of your leads, identify the most engaged ones, and focus on them.

It is equally important to drop a lead when you need to!

After spending weeks or even months nurturing a lead, letting it go can be hard. But, when they are not interested and can’t be pushed through to the next stage, it is better to drop them and focus on others.

Don’t waste your time trying to convince leads that simply aren’t interested. Identify dead leads quickly so you can concentrate on the following opportunities in the pipeline.

5. Review and Update Your Sales Pipeline 

Top sales companies know that a technique that works today may not work tomorrow. So, they review their sales process and strategies regularly to ensure things are on point for maximum efficiency. 

Every sales pipeline changes constantly – new leads come in, move from one stage to another, and finally, deals get closed. If you are not prudent, your pipeline can get helter-skelter and lead to lost deals. You must keep your details and information in your pipeline reviewed and updated for each process stage. 

Related Read: 5 Common Mistakes to Avoid in Sales Operations 

6. Deliver More Content 

Emails and phone calls are indeed the pillars of sales communication. However, people require more; in-depth information that can help them better understand your product/service and is helpful for their business. 

Create content that showcases your brand, product/service, and offerings. Send them to your prospects – this will enable your team to take your potential customers to the next stage. A study by Marketing Charts reports that only 27% of sales reps who talk to prospects collaborate with the marketing team on content creation. But, the sales and marketing teams need to work together to create content your potential customers want to consume.

Optimize Your Sales Pipeline Today 

Not heeding your sales pipeline can negatively impact your business growth.

The aforementioned six sales pipeline best practices can help you drive your sales process, focus on sales pipeline growth, gain better control over sales data, and eventually boost your profits.

You need the right sales pipeline management tools, technology, and expert guidance to achieve this, close more deals, and gain more revenue. 

Key Takeaways

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced B2B sales organizations to reinvent themselves at an unprecedented pace. While sales reps are in the relatively unchartered territory of remote selling, organizations must contend with providing training and coaching to the sales teams remotely. Virtual training methods have been steadily gaining ground as the preferred mode for imparting sales training even before the current crisis. The coronavirus pandemic has made this transition more urgent.