It may help to modify marketing practices.
Do you have a set of long-established practices? If your sales are falling, they may not be doing a very good job. So, a quick overhaul might lead to improvement.
Some of your choices will include:
- Reducing marketing expenditure on slow selling lines. You won’t be missing too much.
- Even better, divert savings from these reductions to increased marketing on your fast selling lines. These are fast selling because they are popular, so pushing them even harder can boost sales as quickly as possible
- Some of your marketing channels will cost more than others per every buyer delivered. Consider reducing expenditure on poor / expensive channels in favour of cheaper or better performing channels.
- Your sales team might be engineered for healthier times. Perhaps they can be downsized.
- Look at any sales incentives you have in place and see if they can be tweaked to your business’s advantage. Perhaps less salary and more incentive basis.
- Have you moved to new channels like eCommerce? It might be hard to do this with any level of sophistication in the short term. But, an eCommerce website can be assembled in a matter of days if it is thought likely to perform. You may even be able to do this yourself, as there are many off-the-shelf tools.
If you are an established business, your Sales and Marketing is likely to be in a rut. A shake-up might improve your Revenue and/or reduce your Costs.