How to Increase Margins and Grow Revenues

With tighter budgets, higher demands, and harder-to-meet sales quotas, organisations must learn to sell smarter if they want to continue growing.

The past decade has been full of transition and uncertainty for businesses throughout the world.

On the one hand, the pandemic has led to long-lasting shifts in consumer behaviour, and organisations have had to implement new strategies to navigate a digital-first marketplace.

On the other hand, talks of recession are now pushing B2B businesses to be more cautious– an attitude that can prevent bold decision-making or timely action to overcome business challenges and continue driving growth.

Considering this situation, durhamlane’s co-founder and CCO Richard Lane highlighted how it has never been more important for sales and marketing leaders to work together as one unified team:

“It is critical that brands stay visible to maintain brand advocacy, and businesses should now, more than ever, be looking to integrate their marketing and sales strategies.

“Sales and marketing teams must work hand in hand, not compete as they have historically – sales teams have the networking capability and key contacts, whilst marketing professionals know how to execute campaigns to appeal to these audiences.

“Working together will give a more seamless, multi-threaded approach to help companies achieve their KPIs. It will be those brands that adopt a cross-channel approach to drive more ROI that will continue their growth trajectory.”

Less leeway for extra costs and frozen incremental headcounts means that businesses need to use their resources and budgets more efficiently to fix gaps in pipeline generation and build a closer alignment between Sales and Marketing. Failure to do so may cause both short- and long-term problems, indeed:

• Without the help of high-quality marketing leads (MQLs), Sales may struggle to build pipeline with outbound tactics alone. Less pipeline means less revenue, and with resources spread thin, the whole organisation will struggle to hit sales and growth targets amid the impending economic downturn. 
• Without high conversions from MQL to SQL (Sales Qualified Leads), Marketing will not meet their KPIs, now increasingly connected to revenue. Failing to do so, CMOs will struggle to justify spending, budgets will shrink, and the overall impact of the brand will suffer. 

In a nutshell, a misalignment between the two functions seizes a business’s revenue-generating engine. During a recession, this challenge can be destructive. An often-overlooked solution is to implement an effective MQL-to-SQL conversion process.

The industry standard for this conversion sits between 1% and 10%. Yet, over the past year, durhamlane has delivered a steady increase in the average MQL-to-SQL conversion rate we provide our clients, reaching 27.44% across all verticals.

We have helped our customers overcome industry obstacles by selling their products and services in more than 50 countries. Working as an extension of our clients’ teams, while identifying and analysing the challenges, needs, and expectations of over 1600 international businesses. What we have learned will further inform how we help our clients increase margins and grow revenues for another decade to come.

The choices businesses make today will determine how they perform in the next 12-18 months, and the changes you implement will shape what your business will look like on the other side of it.

To find out what you can achieve by partnering with us, book a short call.