2025 budget or resource squeeze?

If you're responsible for a sales quota or marketing budget, 2025 promises to be even more challenging than usual.

In anticipation of your customers having less to spend, marketing could well be on the receiving end of budget cuts, reductions in headcount, or both. And what about sales targets? At best, they’ll remain flat, but most businesses will still aim for an upside on the previous year, irrespective of a forecast downturn.

The upshot is, if cuts are made, it’ll certainly make revenue targets more difficult to achieve. Even if they're not, your budget will need to work so much harder to win the hearts and minds of cash-strapped buyers.

When marketing goes under the financial cosh

Of course, in a downturn, businesses need to choose between essential operational costs or marketing spending. Experience tells us that, 99 out of 100 times, it’s going to be the former that wins with adjustments made in the business to try to plug the gaps.

But there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. If there’s a predicted drop in your revenue and budget cuts prevail, there are still many people out there searching for what you’re selling. The need to remain relevant and attractive is vital because your more progressive competitors will most definitely be doing just that. More importantly, you need to be top of mind when the buyer’s proverbial technology wheels fall off and they need to get their hands on what you offer!

Have what it takes

Great results aren't unachievable, but it does mean marketing needs to be better at being able to demonstrate measurable performance and value in everything they do for their sales teams. In return, sales need to respond to leads because there are good reasons to pick up the phone.

Don’t cut your sales channel off at the knees

If you’ve got hungry sales mouths to feed in the form of a partner channel, cutting down on the tools they need to help deliver the task at hand will compound a worsening situation. Their prospects and customers are important to you, especially now, so supporting them should be a key consideration when planning budgets and getting their buy-in to activity.

Work smarter, harder, and do it for less

If you’re lucky enough to be in a buoyant market, there are plenty of reasons to get more from your budget and expect better results. What’s important is to have a keen eye on the necessities and find the best way to achieve them.

8 essentials of a demand-creation programme

With or without budget cuts, making a success of demand creation requires 7 essential things. Cutting corners on any of this will cause leaks in the opportunity pipeline.

1.  A realistic plan for the long-term (not the quarter) aligning budgets, marketing goals with sales results
2.  Great data, continually enriched and updated
3.  An already warm audience waiting to hear what you have to offer
4.  Content that excludes corporate blarney, has a purpose that drives buyer intent indicators
5.  Sophisticated MarTech to measure every digital engagement from every channel
6.  Forensic and live reporting of lead progression for all stakeholders
7.  Hot appointment setters who know how to use the marketing information passed across
8.  Performance-backed SLAs that directly correspond to ROI

Offload the responsibility for results

Delivering the essentials listed above requires many skills and resources. When outsourcing any aspect of demand creation, such as content production, campaign delivery, and event management right through to appointment setting, you deserve accountability and results for your investment. If they’re not offered freely, nor backed by SLAs, then perhaps you need to question if you’re working with the right suppliers.

Taking a demand generation programme as an end-to-end managed service will bring economies of scale and certainty to your revenue pipeline.

Win-Win

With this as a founding principle, a single, holistic, sales and marketing service capable of delivering high-intent leads that are aligned and measured against revenue objectives is a fundamental shift in the way leads are delivered.

Have it all!

If you were to be offered all the essential elements of demand creation, for a fixed monthly fee, guaranteed results and an average cost per lead of £45, would you be curious enough to find out how?

➡️ If so, we’d be happy to offer an overview and demo of our programmes – don't leave without booking a quick chat using the link below

PS.  Some programme models drive towards cost neutrality or the ability to be revenue generative too!