Tired of Managing Your Small Business’s Marketing?

Why Small Business Growth Stalls Even When Leads Are Increasing

You might be generating more inquiries than you were last year and booking more jobs, but if most of that increase is coming from smaller jobs with lower margins, you’ll work yourself to death before you see significant growth in revenue.

Or, you might find that your marketing is producing a ton of leads for a service you weren’t planning to grow, while another service that has capacity and better margins isn’t getting enough opportunities.

At this stage, “more leads” becomes too broad a measurement to tell you if marketing is supporting the growth you want. Because marketing might be producing exactly what you asked for—more leads—but now you’ve grown large enough that the type of lead you’re getting matters much more than it used to.

With this in mind, you need to consider what capacity your services have, what growth you want to see from them, and what services your current leads are going towards. If you want to grow a certain service line, it matters whether enough of those specific leads are coming in. If another part of your company has capacity and better margins, it matters if marketing is helping move that part of the business forward.

This is one of the changes that happens when scaling a service business. The question moves beyond how many leads marketing produced and starts becoming about what kind of business those leads create.

 

When the Right Leads Aren’t Turning Into Revenue

Even if your marketing is bringing in the right opportunities, those leads still have to make it through the rest of your sales process before they become revenue.

For example, when we know the right opportunities are coming in and see low lead-to-estimate or estimate-to-won-job conversion rates, that usually shows that you’re dealing with a different problem than marketing.

What we usually see is that estimators might be booked far enough out that people are choosing someone else to do the job. Or worse, estimates might be going out, but follow-up isn’t happening quickly enough, or in some cases, at all.

In each of those situations, marketing created good opportunities, but the loss of revenue happened inside the company. And this gets harder for you to see as your company grows because you’re no longer involved in every part of the process. When you were smaller, you probably knew who called, what they wanted, whether they converted, and in many cases why they didn’t.

Now your front office handles the call, a technician or estimator meets with the customer, someone follows up, and someone else schedules the work. There are more people involved between the lead and a closed job, which makes the performance of that entire process part of the marketing conversation.

Without that visibility, you can end up changing marketing agencies when your lead volume is fine, increasing your advertising budget when your close rate is low, or pushing for more leads simply because revenue has slowed while your team is already struggling to handle the jobs coming in.

Marketing sends more people into whatever process you already have. If that process is where you’re losing revenue, more leads won’t fix stalled growth.

 

Scaling a Service Business Changes What Marketing Has to Support

This is where your marketing system connects to more than your website, SEO, advertising, and content. Those pieces also have to connect to the decisions you’re making about the company.

It’s also a big part of why small businesses struggle to scale beyond initial growth. What worked to generate growth early on may not be enough to support the company you’re building now.

For marketing to be effective, you must understand:

• What areas of business you want to grow.
• Where you have capacity.
• Which type of work produces the margins you’re looking for.
• If your current marketing efforts are creating the right opportunities and helping you turn leads into customers.

When you take a step back and evaluate what’s happening, you might find that your marketing is still working toward goals you set two years ago that benefited from simply driving more leads. Early on, that might have been enough to create growth, but as your company gets larger, lead volume doesn’t tell the full story. What those leads turn into, what kind of work they produce, and whether that work supports where you’re trying to take the company matter much more than the total number of leads generated.

 

How Do You Know If You’ve Outgrown Your Current Marketing Strategy?

If your marketing seems strong but growth has slowed, the last 90 days will usually tell you quite a bit—if you understand how your leads came in, the kind of work they generated, how much converted, what those jobs were worth, and whether they match what you’re trying to grow.

You might find that marketing is bringing in the wrong kind of work, or that the right opportunities are coming in, but your schedule is too full to get to them quickly, or too many are being lost due to internal processes.

This is also why the best marketing strategies for stalled business growth don’t start with another campaign, more ad spend, or a new platform. A connected marketing system, the right marketing leadership, and a clear understanding of where you want to take the business can help you identify whether marketing is actually causing the slowdown before you spend more trying to fix it.