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Have you been listening to the news and feeling the emotions around you? Maybe, like other sales and business professionals, you have started thinking about ways to cut costs. Decreasing the dollars spent on marketing is often one of the strategies considered. Is this really the wisest choice?

I research a lot. Sometimes I laugh at myself for being an information junkie. I read everything; newsletters, newspapers, books and magazines. Lately, I have noticed two differing thoughts. Some businesses are focusing on the outcome, staying the course and continuing to implement marketing activities and develop the client relationships critical to building and maintaining sales momentum. They may also be proactively ramping it up to cast the net wider and bring in more prospects to fill their pipeline. Other businesses are reactivley cutting back on marketing activities in an effort to lower costs.

The activities within your marketing plan are designed to play out over the course of time, keeping your business top of mind within your target market, generating leads and list building for your sales pipeline. If you implemented activities last month when you thought the economic times were stable but not this month when you may think they are not, you are tampering with that consistency and therefore the flow within your pipeline.

Another factor is the length of your sales cycle. When times get tougher your sales cycle may be lengthening by an extra 30 - 90 days and your marketing strategy may change slightly to take into account this extra time. However long your sales cycle may be, you need to stay in contact with your target market for the duration. I recommend to my clients, who are looking to maximize their follow through, to stay the course, maintaining the current level of marketing activities and also proactively implement more ideas rather than be reactively implement less.

Now is the time to change the game and do more with what you already have.

Help your prospects and customers choose your business by adding more value. Look for ways to demonstrate this added value and ways to let your target market hear about it. 

Below are several ideas you could implement to demonstrate added value.

• Highlight your great service with success stories. Do not just say you have great service, go one step further and demonstrate by gathering testimonials that showcase your service. Why keep it a secret. Interview your current happy customers. When you write the resulting story talk about the longevity of your business and the mutual benefits of the partnership you have with customers. If you can, demonstrate your positive impact on your client*s business with statistics or example of specific problems solved.

• Identify good, better, best solutions and why the chosen solution worked for that client*s problem.

• Look for client businesses within your target market that are doing well. Find out what they are doing to drive sales. Gather information about what they are doing through spotlight interviews or surveys. Use the information to build a story to send to your target market about how your industry adds value. 
• The process of collecting the above information could lead to joint ventures and cross promotions within your existing customer base or bring to light opportunities for new ways to support clients with your current products.
• Reward your customers with a gift card at various sales volumes. Always nice to thank customers who give you a testimonial or an order. People not only love to receive a free gift but they love to pick a gift. No one returns a gift they choose for themselves. 
• Run a sales promotion for your team and reward sales volume and testimonials collected. Gift cards are great and very useful for holiday season and special occasions. Added bonus, they fit easily into an envelope and you can include your business card! 
• Highlight the cost of the lost opportunity if your customer does not use your product or service. Contrast this with an example from the above testimonials. 
• Go back and dig out those business cards from the last trade show or networking event that you may have lost in a folder.
• Plan to build a system that keeps warm leads in your sales pipeline long enough to develop from prospects to clients. 

Plan to implement these ideas - or similar ones from your marketing plan - even if you are without the time, knowledge or expertise on staff to move forward.