If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re likely going to make difficult decisions every day in your business. How much to invest in your marketing doesn’t have to be one of them.
If you believe in your team, there’s no limit to how much you can invest in marketing. There are a number of reasons why you might be considering reining in your marketing spending, but what I’ve learned from my own experience is that it almost always comes down to confidence.
If you’re not confident that your team can convert a lead into new business when a call comes in or a contact form gets filled out, you’ll likely ease up on marketing. Why? Because you don’t want to squander a lead and waste your money.
It doesn’t have to be that way, however. Once you acknowledge the problem — that your hiring or training processes may be killing your confidence in your team — you can fix what needs to be fixed and crank up your marketing spending knowing that it won’t be wasted.
Let’s dive a little deeper into this issue.
Two Struggles Tied To Confidence
Early on, many entrepreneurs often feel like they have to do everything in their business. I speak from experience. It’s hard to have confidence in anyone else, so you only invest up to what you can personally handle. By doing that, though, you become the bottleneck.
As your team grows and the business matures, you’ll ideally begin to develop trust in others, which allows you to let go of the reins and increase your marketing spending. But what happens if the money you invest causes you to experience massive growth?
My business has grown 1,500% in the last three years in large part due to our marketing efforts. It’s amazing, but at the same time, it’s intimidating. There are only so many spots on the calendar and so many account executives to go around.
If you find yourself in this situation and your confidence is shaken, it’s probably not due to a lack of confidence in your existing team members. It’s more likely due to a lack of confidence in your hiring process. You may be worried that you won’t be able to hire the right people to fill the seats you desperately need to fill.
It’s Not Really About Capacity
Sometimes entrepreneurs really do face a capacity problem and need to pause their marketing to focus on hiring new people. But I’d say that’s 2% of all cases.
The other 98% of cases are usually all about a lack of confidence. Business owners may worry that if they crank up their marketing spending, the phones won’t be answered perfectly every time, or that a contact form won’t be responded to right away. If they’re not hiring the right people and training them properly, this might be a legitimate concern. Granted, leaders may never admit this is what’s keeping them up at night.
But their actions often betray their true feelings. After all, if they believed that their team was the equivalent of the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, and that they would perfectly execute every mission no matter how chaotic things got, why wouldn’t they infinitely invest in their marketing?
However, if you have a robust hiring process that screens for the characteristics of your most successful team members, and a comprehensive training regimen to onboard them effectively, then scaling should be much easier on you.
How To Gain Confidence In Your Team
To build your confidence in your team, the first step is being able to pull yourself out of the sales and marketing processes. Make sure that the team you’ve hired and trained can close deals and drive revenue without you.
To help increase my confidence in my team — and increase their self-confidence — I regularly stress test them with doomsday scenarios. I tell them the file server is down, that two people have called in sick, that one person missed their flight on the way to a client video shoot or that a client wants a refund and I can’t be reached. Then I ask them what they’ll do.
At first, these fire drills scared them to death. But now, they expect me to throw these scenarios at them, and they’re prepared to respond. That makes me confident that no matter what happens, I can trust my team to handle it, even if I’m not there.
Another aspect of gaining confidence is getting the right people in the right seats. Again, this comes down to having hiring and training processes in place that set your team up to succeed. Without those processes in place, it may be a disaster if you ramp up your marketing spending. But if you trust those processes, why hold back?
To ensure that you hire the right people, try to get a sense of your candidates’ instinctive methods of operation, what naturally drives them and how their communication and work styles might fit into your team. We use a conative strengths assessment called the Kolbe A Index, as well as a few other assessments.
Next, ensure that your training covers all aspects of your business, whether or not every person in every department deals with the others directly. We train our new hires on our industry as a whole as well as on what goes into marketing, sales and production at every level. This helps them understand our entire pipeline and gives them the tools they need to be as agile and adaptable as I need them to be.
As you grow, remember that there will be levels you hit where you need to scale up your infrastructure or your people. Sometimes the team members and processes that got you to one level won’t get you to the next one. That’s okay. Trust that your hiring and training processes can get the right people in the right seats, and that those people are capable of helping you scale.
Once that’s done, you can increase your marketing spending with confidence.
