Sales Slowing Down, Stalling Or Shrinking? It Might Be Time To Review The Ol’ Marketing Playbook

If your marketing engine’s ability to attract and close qualified leads suddenly doesn’t seem to be firing on all cylinders, is it time to review your marketing playbook?

First let’s be clear what I’m talking about.  Your marketing playbook is probably not a dog-eared hardback full of hand-scribbled notes that your marketing director wears on a lanyard around their neck. Instead, think of your playbook as the collection of tactics and approaches you use to attract new customers. It could be as simple as the trade shows you attend and the tchotchkes you give away, or it may be a complex, well documented, multi-channel go-to-market strategy. Regardless, this tried-and-true approach has probably delivered some level of success – perhaps for years. 

Until the day that it doesn’t.

The telltale sign is when your leadership pays a visit to the marketing team seeking an explanation of why things have started to slow down, stall, or shrink in terms of leads and sales – and why the efforts which have “always worked” don’t seem to be working anymore. 

Before you throw your old playbook into the fire (I know I just told you it wasn’t a real book, but just go with the analogy), here are five key questions you should try to answer first to figure out what — if anything — you may need to change:

1. Is This Shift Temporary … Or Permanent?  Seasonality, macroeconomic trends, and other factors may cause a temporary downward (or upward) shift in demand for your product or service that may be beyond your control. If that’s the case, you may not need to make any long-term changes and can just ride out the cycle.  On the other hand, are there tweaks you can try (different spend levels, new creative, new channels, different formats, etc.) to make some marginal improvements to your results? My digital media compadres might argue you should have been doing this every few weeks anyway. But regardless, if it seems to be a more permanent change, you’ll need to dig a bit deeper with the questions below.

3. Is It The Plan … Or The People? Have you added anyone to your marketing team recently who may not understand how/why things are done a certain way?  Or more likely, has everyone been in the same role for multiple years, and new ideas all get killed on the vine because “we tried that before and it didn’t work”?  I’ve had the good fortune to work across the globe, and I can say with certainty that there is no one that can suck the life out of a room faster than the defeated, disillusioned marketing planner.  The plan may still be sound, but it might be time for some fresh blood to get everyone off of auto-pilot and reinvigorate your efforts.

4. Is It The Creative … Or The Tactics? Getting to the root cause of a decline in traffic or sales might take some work. On one hand, it could just be the campaign creative you are running is getting old and needs to be refreshed. Do you have an ongoing test-and-learn strategy with your media, where you are continuously A/B testing your creative? Or could it be the message is fine, but the audience who needs to hear it has shifted to a different platform? Is it time to try a new (to you) channel, like video, OOH, geo-targeted mobile, or digital audio? If you are running a lot of digital media, improving performance could be as simple as shifting money between platforms or channels in search of a better ROAS. But it may also be time to give a new channel a try.

5. Is it the Customer … or the Competition? Is the audience you are reaching really your target audience? Or put differently, are the customers you are bringing in today the ones you set out to attract? Or have they changed over time?  Are sales and marketing still aligned on who your target customer really is? Do you have buyer personas with well-defined pain points and a messaging framework that positions your solution as the best? Are you finding yourself under continuous downward price pressure as your customer base has shifted away from people who were willing to pay a premium for your product or service and you are now perceived more as a commodity? Has the online chatter about you on reddit or social sites taken a negative turn? Has someone come in with a very targeted keyword campaign and driven up the CPCs across your core search campaigns? On the other hand, have your competitors done something entirely new/different?  Is there a new low-cost leader (or premium product) that has entered the space, so now your product-market fit isn’t as clear as it used to be?

So getting back to the question at hand, do you really need a new marketing playbook? The reality is, the market is an ever-shifting landscape, and companies who treat their marketing as a static, laminated, never-to-be-updated document instead of a living, breathing, flexible set of approaches are doomed to run into issues sooner or later. If you find yourself in this situation, maybe it’s time for a fresh look – and we can help.

At Chameleon Collective, we are in the business of transforming businesses, and many of our engagements start with our flagship CLEAR marketing assessment. CLEAR focuses on a deep dive into the three key elements that are critical to drive consistent and predictable revenue: strategy, team, and your go-to-market execution (hitting on many of the questions outlined in this article). When we’re done, we’ll have the exact short-, medium- and long-term actions needed to transform your marketing playbook into a marketing-fueled growth engine.

Let us know how we can help!  You can reach me directly at alex.hultgren@chameleon.co or alex@customers1stmarketing.com