At the Mid-Atlantic Marketing Summit I recently attended, speakers emphasized the importance of having a sales funnel.
This means that your organization has a way to drive traffic to your website (or other landing page), collect leads and ultimately — land new customers.
Is this something your organization currently has in place? If not, you aren’t alone. Many Economic Development Organizations still don’t use their website as a sales funnel and aren’t sure how to get started.
There are many tools out there to create sales funnels, like Hubspot. Or you can hire a team, like PPR Strategies to help you.
But this can lead to the next roadblock: One thing that can stop EDOs from getting support is that it can require a significant investment.
So what’s the answer?
It all goes back to square 1: You need to set your goals for the future and make a plan now for how you’ll justify your budget to elected officials.
By January, if not sooner, people are submitting budgets to elected officials. You need to do research now for what you want to include your budget for what will go in effect next July. (No, January is not too early to plan for fiscal year starting July 1st!)
Whether you create an annual report, one-pager, or series of infographics, you need to do something to illustrate the return on the investment that your office provides for the community. This is true whether you are a city, county, or state organization.
Ultimately, you need to figure out what the priority is in your business over the next three years, and structure your organization for that. It can be tempting to get dragged down by the day-to-day needs, so that you never look ahead into the future. But if you’re constantly worried about not having what you need right now, you certainly won’t have it 3 years from now.
The time is NOW to start planning for a successful upcoming fiscal year! Take the time to plan for the future now — you’ll thank yourself later. 🙂
‘Til next time,
Sandy
