Using the Summer Sales Slump to Prepare for Success in the Fall
Been awhile since you’ve heard from us here at Lead Cookie. We hope your summer is going well and if you’re in a sales slump–like many B2B businesses are at this time of year–you’re using it wisely to prepare for September and Q4!
In the spirit of preparing for a busy and profitable fall, something we’re doing here ourselves at Lead Cookie, we figured we’d share a couple sales and marketing actions for things you can be doing now to prepare yourself for success coming out of summer. Going from strategic to tactical, here are 4 things you can start doing now:
Working on your positioning and offer(s). Take the learnings from the year-to-date and look at who you’ve had success selling to, who you haven’t, and who you want to do more work with. Then look at what they’re buying and saying, and how you can best align your positioning and offer(s) with that. This is something we’ve been doing with our new Lead Cookie Core offer, a more affordable, scalable offer that meets the demand of a lot of the smaller businesses we work with.
Planning an outbound campaign to start at the end of August as people return to work. Most businesses don’t start planning their campaigns until September, this often means not launching until close to Q4 instead of when people are back in the office. Our general recommendation is to be ready to launch before Labor Day. For cold email, if you’re not already using secondary domains (i.e. lead-cookie.com instead of leadcookie.com) you’ll want to buy them now, put email accounts on them, and begin warming them so they’re ready in a few weeks for use. This is something we do for all clients and if you’re struggling with it we can help.
Cleaning up your CRM / email list so it’s ready for outreach, newsletters, and retargeting ads (we’ve actually started using AdRoll to show targeted display ads to the lists we use in ours and our clients’ outbound). You can use a tool like DropContact to find/validate emails, check if a lead is still in the same role/company or if they’ve changed, and more.
Tracking who visits your website–at an individual LinkedIn profile level–and building a list from this to feed into your outbound and other marketing efforts. We’re using a new tool called RB2B that is able to identify website visitors (specifically those in the US) at a personal level, enabling incredibly targeted outbound. Get this installed ASAP (they have a great free plan and it doesn’t require a credit card to sign up!) to start building your visitor list. If you’re having trouble figuring this out, let us know and we can help you get it set up and enrich the leads that visit your website.
Over the next few weeks we’ll be writing more about each of these 4 activities (and more!), diving into each one in detail to give you the strategies and tactics you need to generate new business this fall.
