Think Before You Slash Your Growth Team
Categorized in: Fractional Marketing, B2B Digital Marketing
In business, uncertainty can come in many forms. These include changes related to the industry you’re working in, economy, buying habits, technology, and more. In fact, to remain in business over the long term, changes may start to feel like the norm. But what happens when these changes start to affect your bottom line?
Many companies respond by aggressively slashing the budget, encouraging layoffs, and letting any third-party help go. While it’s true that cutting costs night be inevitable, we’d like to caution you against cutting the team that is responsible for your growth. The reason for this is, if everyone responsible for bringing in new business is gone, who’s going to do it? Here are some thoughts that will help you make the right decisions for your business.
Change Might Be Temporary
If you react strongly to change and slash your budget while you’re panicking, this could be an extreme overreaction if the changes that were impacted your business turn out to be temporary. We’ve seen this before. Leads are down because of something that happened in the news, and instead of hunkering down and waiting to see what happens, companies slash their budgets and let everyone go.
Meanwhile, three months later, everything rebounds. If your growth team is gone, however, you won’t be rebounding. You will continue to lose momentum until you find a way to get your growth team back.
Continue the Momentum No Matter What
Did you experience a period of growth as a company? If so, think about the reason why. You brought in leads. Your sales teams worked the leads. Marketing and sales may have been working in tandem to bring in new business. If no new business is coming in, the impulse could be to downsize the department. After all, nothing they are doing is working.
Think again. Marketing still needs to put out new content. Sales still needs to follow up on any leads that are coming in. Everything needs to happen on a regular, consistent basis if you’re going to have your momentum return after the uncertainty is over. If you take the growth team away, you will lose momentum, and then it will take a long time to get the momentum back once the dust settles.
Think Before You React
We aren’t saying that you slash your budget. You’ll need to cut corners to stay operational. We have just observed that it is much better to think before you react. Weigh the pros and cons of each potential budget decision. For example, if you had four members of your sales team to work all the leads that came in, you may not need all four during the lean times. However, you will still need a sales team, even if there are no leads are coming in. But, do you really need all four of them?
That was just an example, but it does illustrate the point. You can slash your budget while still thinking about growth. You’ll need to grow at some point, but it doesn’t make sense to slash your growth team entirely.
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