No Time To Market? | Marketing

When speaking with many Business Owners, CEO’s Sales and Marketing professionals, the most common thread and biggest enemy is TIME!

The lack of time to carry out proactive sales and marketing initiatives is one of the most frustrating elements of running a business. Large and small organisations alike, we find that while most executives know exactly what they want and even how to do it, they simply don’t have the bandwidth to deploy the level or quality of marketing activities they would like. We hope that taking 5 minutes to read this will save you ‘time to market’ in the longer term.

Being ‘time poor’ in business is a real problem and a subject frequently studied and written by business scholars. Often it is the business development and marketing that suffers because business owners, executives must deal with the here and now. As a result, activities such as the future promotion of their business are left until last, they are not forgotten, but neglected.

This article is not written to dictate to you how you manage your own time more effectively, we list some simple and pain-free ideas for where you can work smarter and create time to spend on Sales and Marketing activities.

Improve your Sales & Marketing tech Stack

While surveying a selection of Sales and Marketing professionals, we found that they spend too much time logging in and out of platforms, cross-referencing data, even just searching through emails! This is time which could be better spent elsewhere. 

Cobbled together Vs streamlined!

Secret Source help clients with their Marketing Tech Stack, by sunsetting disjointed systems that a business might be hanging onto because they fulfilled a purpose. Updating to fully integrated sales and marketing solution saves so much time! No more logging in and out of different point solutions, copying and pasting data or relying on different reports. No need to spend time searching to find client or prospect emails, instead miss nothing, everything in one place, under the client, prospect partner. This will not only save you money spent on overlapping systems, but save you the most important commodity, TIME!

The above demonstrates how companies large and small are using a mixture of freemium and paid solutions to deliver on their marketing (Source: Hubspot). Without knowing it, you are spending time dipping in and out of different systems to get the job done. Automate simple processes, renewals, reminders, product updates…whatever it might be, using automated workflows will help you behind the scenes and keep in touch with your market, while you focus on running the business.

Gain more time to market by improving the accuracy and consistency of your internal teams that will reduce the need for checking, re-work or following up on errors made.

Improvements to your Sales and Marketing Tech Stack will enable better, more accurate and timely information for your business, and you can then re-invest your time on the right activities, by cutting out wasted effort.

Ask for Help

If you not only want to find the time to market, but scale your business in the right way, then outsourcing your marketing to professionals is the way forward. Research carried out by Inc.com shows that Business Owners and Execs waste 6.8 hours a week on tasks that they could have outsourced to specialists. Nearly seven hours a week, believed to be higher, multiplied by the other members of your organisation all adds up to a lot of wasted time.

Therefore, think about engaging with an outsourced marketing specialist to help you get some time back. While outsourcing marketing may incur a cost, it will however get a quality result and be quicker to get things done. Outsourced marketing companies is a sure way to guarantee that activity is happening, consistently, over time.

Hiring an outsourced marketing team, is different to hiring an agency or multiple specialists, instead a dedicated outsourced marketing team have all the skills needed to affect a result, including the technology and software at their disposal to deliver marketing activities for your business. Outsourcing any business activity was once frowned upon because of the misconception of a lack of control over aspects like quality. However, payroll, human resource, service support has all been outsourced by growing companies.

The adoption of an outsource marketing model has gained in popularity following the global pandemic crisis. Outsourcing marketing can cost in the region of between £550-£10,000 a month depending on what you require, but add on-costs, training, remuneration etc. and it starts to make sense. Importantly, the problem of finding time to market dissipates instantly!

'Doing more with less time' is a myth according to the research by Enterprisers Project. So, if you have no time to market, then give it to someone who does it every day, leaving you more time to concentrate on running the business. Read this article from a CEO who typically led large internal departments, then realised their time would be better spent if they outsourced marketing. Read their experiences here ‘Reasons why I decided to outsource my marketing’.

Ever considered that it may be your business model which is hindering your time to market? Consider looking at who is responsible for your marketing and helping them to deliver it better for a more positive outcome. The Revenue Operations (RevOps) model has been known to transform a company’s revenue engine by 12-15 times! Read more here, 'Why RevOps might be a good idea'

Get marketing working while you sleep!

Wouldn’t it be nice if your marketing engine could be working for you while you concentrate on other things? There is a lot you can do to help drive awareness and education of your brand, products, services that once set up, can continue to promote your business even when you are in bed!

Why not try these simply ‘less’ time-consuming marketing activities?

1. Post on LinkedIn, activities that are of interest to your audience – These articles posted on LinkedIn on your business page or personal profile can be accessed by millions of people 24/7. 
2. Update your Google Business Page – This won’t cost you a penny! It hardly takes anytime at all to set up or maintain and it will help people find you, educate, or even convert them into a customer!
3. Get Social - Like, comment, and share on other people’s posts, within your target audience across different social channels. This can be done in the evening, on the train, waiting for a meeting to start!
4. Hire channel partners who can help promote your business – Why not leverage the market reach a potential channel partner has? The time and money you would be spending on your marketing, it might be better to partner with someone or another business with the time, resources, or mature connections to help you scale. 
5. Affiliate sites - There are several affiliate sites in your market, you need to find them, tap into them, and they will help promote your brand while you concentrate on other business activities 
6. Customers are your biggest ambassador, use them - No time to market, then recruit your customers to help you do that for you. Your customers chose you and business for a reason, either through necessity, desire or to fix a challenge they were experiencing. Encourage your customers to share their experience with people/businesses in the same situation. They will be marketing your business, expanding your reach by making aware, educating, and maybe even converting your prospects, while you are carrying out other duties. 
   
   

Summary – All in good time

While our time is finite, it is how we choose to use it that is key. No-one can create more time in a day/week/year, but using tactics like a more streamlined Sales and marketing Tech Stack, outsourcing marketing, getting others to help promote your business for you will in turn increase your own time to market your business properly.

If you want to action some or all these points above, then what are you waiting for, as Antoine de Saint-Exupery once said,

However, if you need some help to get started, then get in touch today.

You might also like to try;

• RevOps - For companies who want to grow!
• B2B Marketing Spend - Emerging from the pandemic
• Make more sales deals, not more sales admin
• More useful resources