Brand new business that just recently launched, young startup with a brilliant idea, established company in recession – what might they all have in common? No budget for sales. Does it mean that it’s a dead end? Of course not!
A lot of entrepreneurs, when starting the business, rely on their existing network and word of month. About 80% of people and companies that I met for the last 9 years started this way. And it’s a logical choice – just because it is easier to sell to those who you already know, who trust you. As the business will keep on growing and scaling, at some point of a time it might be not enough anymore. But what if revenue is still not sufficient to hire a strong sales team, while the network does not deliver the needed amount of leads and deals?
Action items
The first thing you need to define is your goals and expectations. Without a goal it won’t work. Assess your current performance and revenue. What is the desired level you want to achieve? Which percent growth is required to keep on scaling? Is it feasible? According to Harvard Business Review, the company is considered to be growing sufficiently if it fits within the 10% to 25% range.
After setting up your goals you need to think about the ways of achieving them. So let’s take a look at what you can do without an extensive sales budget.
Grow your network
First things first – your network is your most valuable asset in business development. Remember that it’s easier to buy from those who you already know and trust. Those who you know at least something about. And an important point here is that the process of continuous network growth should never stop. This is one of the most common mistakes.
Not everyone you will be meeting down your way will need the product or service you sell. Or immediately become your customers. You should be ready for this.
If someone you connect with is not interested in your offering, it does not mean they might not get interested later. This period between no need and a formed one is ideal to establish a humane relationship, learn more about each other. And if the need comes, you might be one of the first persons to be reached out.
Moreover, it’s worth connecting to not only “potential customers” – now or in future. Think globally. You never know who might be helpful to you and vice versa. Network is a super powerful tool to meet new people from the industry, learn from peers, follow competitors.
And don’t be afraid to try. Quite often I hear – “I am bad at this”, “I don’t have time”. Of course someone will not be interested in talking to you. But others will. Delegate a part of your responsibilities and just give it a try.
Where to start: LinkedIn, events (conferences, meetups, summits), professional groups and communities.
Scale existing customers
Finding new customers is always more complicated than growing existing ones. Strong account management team requires extensive investments – that’s true. But there are still quite some things you can do in order to keep a track of your customers’ progress.
Apparently, one of the easiest ways is to stay in touch with them – via email, social media or messengers. On the other hand, they might not always have enough time to talk to you.
So you need to follow their activities, read their news, follow the trends and updates.
And if you see something which you can reinforce – be sure to reach out.
Where to start: LinkedIn, website, newsletters, social media, annual reports, Crunchbase, customer satisfaction surveys.
Hire globally
Thanks to globalization, nowadays employers and business owners have much easier access to talent around the world. Of course it always seems better to have people in the office, where you can discuss strategies and plans in person. On the other hand, focusing on local talents limits not only your choice possibilities but also puts you into strict salary requirements. Quite often sales people prefer to have high base rates which is very popular across Europe. At the same time, there are a lot of countries preferring the model of lower base rate plus commissions. And it gives you more space for maneuver if your budget is limited.
Where to start: Payscale (for salaries analysis), local job boards, LinkedIn.
Grow young talents
Another option to consider – growing your own people internally. It will take more time and effort than hiring someone experienced. But such an approach has quite some nice advantages.
People that grow together with your company are proven to have higher loyalty, better product / service understanding, and take active part in processes building. So taking a bright young talent with the right mindset without experience is a great way to grow a professional in a longer term perspective.
Where to start: Gradguide (for finding graduates / interns), universities, schools, professional fairs.
Create relevant content
It’s not a secret that creating quality content takes a lot of time and effort. And there’s no guarantee that it will make your website or business more visible. But content itself is a very powerful tool not only in marketing but also in sales. Especially outbound ones.
Relevant and interesting content will show your expertise, ability to solve problems. Give your network a possibility to learn more about your business. Tell them what you are good at, why it might be valuable for them to use your product or service.
Where to start: Blog, LinkedIn posts, webinars, videos, case studies.
Play around with automation
There are a lot of tools which might help you with process automation. Many of them have freeming options or might even be free. It apparently won’t be a silver bullet solution, but might make a difference with a limited budget.
If you plan to try content strategy, think about tools which can help you with creation, optimization and distribution. Planning an outbound outreach – try ChatGPT for messages creation, emailing tools, outreach automation.
Where to start: Expandi.io, Reply.io, Textmetrics, Linked Helper etc.
NB: I personally don’t like outreach automation tools – just because a human still writes more genuine and empathetic messages. But in case of limited budget and time it might be a good solution. Just be careful with it to not get blocked or considered as spam.
Pay it forward
Remember the first point about growing the network? Not everyone you will be meeting down your way will become your customer. But they can help you with building good reputation, relations and introducing you to other people.
Be kind to others. Help someone for free and ask them about a reference or testimonial. People buy from people – always remember about it. Grow your brand with a positive attitude. People will be happy to refer others to you if they feel nice about you themselves.
Where to start: Workshops, startup accelerator / incubator mentoring, webinars, consultations, partnership.
Grow partner network
Partnership is a good way to find new customers without investing a lot. Find those who would want to mutually benefit and let it flow. Be sure to add good value to the partners and not only additional revenue. Align the strategies – sometimes it might be easier to sell your products as a package rather than separately. Think about companies whose service or product you might complement.
Where to start: LinkedIn, professional communities, groups.
Improve SEO
Search engine optimization is not the cheapest thing to do while having a limited budget. On the other hand, there are still a bunch of things you can do to grow your website traffic. And at the end of the day, it will cost you less than hiring a sales team. Higher traffic will raise brand awareness, will make you more visible and in a long term perspective will result in inbound inquiries.
Where to start: Moz, AnswerTheWeb, Semrush, Google Keyword planner.
Empower social media
One of the most popular professional social media is LinkedIn, so having a good media strategy there is important. Be sure that your company page is not empty. Share content, valuable insights, news. Keep your accounts alive, show the people behind the business to your network. And don’t forget about key profiles as well – managerial team as well as everyone engaged in sales.
At the same time, LinkedIn is not the only social platform that can help. Depending on your product / service you should also explore other options. Find out where your potential customers reside and go there. If you for example work in the DACH region, check Xing.
Where to start: LinkedIn, TikTok, Instagram, Discord communities, Reddit, Twitter.
Experiment with pricing, deals and referrals
If you look for a new tool for yourself, does the possibility of taking a free trial raise your chances to try it? For me, in 90% of cases, it does. Play around with different options for your pricing strategy. Apart from free ones you can always think about discounts, deals, loyalty programs and bonuses.
Another great thing to try – referrals. If your existing customer loves your product or service, getting the bonus for referral might motivate them to recommend you to their network. Partner referrals also proved to work well.
Where to start: Vouchers, discounts, bonuses, referral programs, loyalty bonuses, pricing options.
Advertise
The last but not the least approach to try – advertisement. Of course you can tell me – it’s very expensive and not efficient. May be. Or may be not. Give it a try, analyze ROI, make an adjustment and keep on going. It would be over optimistic to expect that a 50 dollar advertisement would generate a million dollar deal, right? Would be great. But unfortunately, not feasible.
Today many ads providers allow you to set up a monthly budget threshold which is useful if our budget is limited. Be creative – think about other ways. The ads are not limited by social media only. If your target audience reads the books – make an agreement with the publishing company to add your brochure to each package. If they commute by bus – talk to the bus operators. If they have pets, talk to pet shops or cleaning bags producers.
Where to start: Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, distributors, games, events.
How to check if I move well enough
Playing around with different approaches in a limited budget situation is not enough. In order to understand how well you are progressing with it and take appropriate actions, you need to set up analytics. In the beginning of this article we talked about the importance of goal setting. Depending on the option you might choose to begin with, the indicators you should track will be different. Let’s look at several of the key ones.
– Conversion rate
It’s important to understand how well the leads you generate through this or that approach you try convert further to potential customers and closed deals. If you have a CRM system (which I hope you do), the best chart to use is a funnel to see the movement of your leads through the pipeline.
There’s no golden standard of a good conversion rate. In my practice, the one between 15 and 20% is considered to be good.
– ROI (Return on Investment)
When you try something new, it’s natural to understand how much you get in versus funds invested. In the case of using free tools and keeping your budget as low as possible, it’s convenient to use your time as the metric for investments. Define the price of an hour of your work, calculate the number of hours spent in order to get a customer and use it as a cost indicator.
– Sales cycle duration
Depending on the sales approach you might be using as well as the action item, the duration of getting new customers might differ dramatically. If your outreach is very direct and straightforward and is combined with network growth, you might get your first results faster than sticking to content creation strategy or SEO. Thus, it’s important to understand the time within which the method brings you new deals and adjust appropriately.
– Customer acquisition cost
The cost of advertising is usually higher than network growing or automated outreach. So it’s essential to have a clear vision on costs you spend in order to get a new customer. And compare it with other approaches you try.
There are a lot of other important KPIs which sales teams keep a track of. You might also want to understand your Customer lifetime value which might differ depending on the customer, but this indicator will be hard to calculate for the new deals. But you can always make a forecast and compare it with the existing ones.
When it comes to SEO, Advertising or Content creation, another indicator you should track is your website traffic.
Summary
If your sales budget is limited it does not mean that nothing can be done. There are a lot of things you can do and play around with. Most of them will require time which is precious. And none of them is an ultimate solution. It’s always better to combine different approaches, experiment with several of them simultaneously. If you decide to go for network growing, you can successfully combine it with finding new partners and scaling your existing customers. And content creation might work well in combination with SEO.
Sales is about constant experimentation. And analysis. Doing something for just doing does not bring business value. Be sure to constantly analyze every step you take and every move you make. It will help you to understand if your progress is good enough and which adjustments you need to make in order to keep on scaling.
