//  Marketing Is Driving Leads, But Is Your Business Ready?

A marketing campaign can be successful, but the business can still “lose.” Marketing’s job is to amplify, share, and celebrate what already exists at a company. But sometimes a campaign actually amplifies the cracks in the business’s foundation.

Are your business’s operations ready for marketing to start driving interest? Or is your marketing giving prospects a pretty, but empty, gift box?

Three Real Scenarios

A quick note: Each of these stories is true, about a client or a company someone on our team has worked with in the past. We’ve redacted any identifying information to respect privacy — we’re not in the business of airing dirty laundry, but we do believe in sharing experiences so everyone can learn from them. 

1. A multi-channel brand launch campaign drove over $280,000 in revenue opportunity in two months — but the client wasn’t equipped to handle the leads. Opportunities quickly cooled and stagnated, resulting in a campaign that was both successful and a catastrophic failure.
2. An established but financially struggling company asked for more marketing, more campaigns to bring in new leads to keep them afloat. But an audit of leads over time showed that opportunities had been steadily and significantly increasing — over 73% since we started tracking. The issue was actually a series of operational leaks (like a weak CRM and a lack of follow-up urgency and ownership) where leads fell through the cracks and turned cold.
3. A national service company implemented a new scheduling and ordering portal, pushing it live before it had been thoroughly stress tested. When marketing campaigns started driving traffic, the portal failed, leaving both employees and customers frustrated and angry, ultimately degrading the brand’s reputation.

Why Do Misfires Happen to Small Businesses?

Misfires like these are all too common, and they aren’t unique to small businesses. (Marketing and operations misalignment happens even in international corporations, like the Burger King example in our marketing strategist’s LinkedIn post.) But small businesses tend to be especially susceptible. Some of the most common reasons we’ve seen include:

1. The “Do Something” pressure a business feels when growth seems to be stalling out — That frantic and/or competitive pressure is often also coupled with internal financial pressures like payroll and rent. This combination often leads to urgency, meaning quick (and sometimes short-sighted) decisions.
2. No dedicated team ownership plan — With small businesses, it can be hard to assign ownership and hold accountability. Team members are often wearing many hats, so leads, operations, and execution can all fall through the cracks. 
3. Marketing vendors running uninformed campaigns — Without having real conversations with the business about both their needs and, importantly, their current capabilities, even the most creative, lead-driving marketing campaign can still be a loss for the business.

Where Is the Breakdown?

Misfires usually come down to at least one of these issues:

Internal Misalignment

Despite best intentions, it can be easy for teams to slip into silos. In small businesses especially, departments often step up and take forward motion into their own hands for the sake of expediency. But when those business areas become singularly focused on what they need, overall business- and team-level direction tends to become fuzzy. The owner, ops leader, sales rep, and marketer all have different answers to Who is the customer? and What are we promising? and Why? When areas aren’t aligned, campaigns might be making promises the business can’t keep.

Sales Can’t Handle the Leads

The sales team might not be optimally handling campaign leads for a number of reasons. A slow response might mean a shoddy CRM keeps dropping contacts, teams are overwhelmed by lead quantity, lead ownership is unclear, internal processes are weak, teams are working in multiple platforms that don’t integrate cleanly — the list goes on. Identifying why, where, and how that follow-up falls is key.

Operations Can’t Deliver on Product/Service

Operations has a huge job, especially in a small business setting. It’s a broad area often responsible for inventory, capacity, service and product quality, internal training and communications, and more. A marketing campaign at the wrong time can quickly drown ops and PR teams, like the McDonald’s Szechuan sauce flop or the barista strikes on Starbucks Red Cup Day. These examples happened to large international corporations with the resources to recover, but small businesses often can’t absorb that kind of failure.

Foundational Blocks Aren’t Established

A solid organizational base before a marketing launch is critical for long-term success. For a small business, those missing cornerstone blocks might mean:

• The website isn’t ready to handle online inquiries.
• The business is still trying to determine its messaging or positioning. 
• There’s no measurement system in place, so the business doesn’t have a way to see what’s working and differentiate success from a miss. 
• A product/service offering is contingent on a single team member’s contribution.
• Inventory is unstable or facing complex supply chain logistics.

And these are just a few examples. Without a solid foundation, the business’s cracks expose themselves when marketing starts driving new customers.

Consequences of Misalignment Between Marketing and Other Business Areas

1. Wasted ad spend — This is the obvious one. Marketing budgets are always expected to drive revenue, but a small business often feels the lack of return on ad spend more acutely than larger businesses.
2. Lost revenue from the hidden cost of all the leads that cooled between touches — That cool-down happens fast. For sales teams, the gold standard has long been response within 5 minutes. According to a 2011 study, outreach within the first hour of receiving a lead qualifies at a 7x higher rate versus waiting even one additional hour. That jumps to 60x more likely to qualify compared to responding after 24 hours. (Harvard Business Review). This study is over a decade old, and, if anything, consumer expectations of immediacy have increased since then. Anecdotally, we’ve seen a 50% increase in one client’s scheduled appointment rate after building automations with immediate follow-ups.
3. Internal morale drop — After a misfire, internal tensions can run high. Teams can turn on each other, start playing the blame game. (Think: Customer Service complaining that a product shipped too early while the Product team argues that the support team just isn’t educated enough about the item to handle objections.) This is a recipe for conflict, and, if not addressed, can ultimately lead to internal collapse.
4. Long-term impact of reputation damage — Remember those cold leads? They didn’t just fade into the ether. When one of their friends or colleagues asks for a recommendation in your space, chances are good that your business will proactively come up as a Do Not Explore — and that means lost future revenue from negative word of mouth.
5. A feeling that Marketing just doesn’t work for us — More often than not, some internal adjustments to communication and alignment can better prepare the business for marketing campaign results.

How Does a Small Business Resolve Misalignment Between Marketing and Operations?

The answer is short and unglamorous. To ensure alignment, teams need to sit down and have an honest, clear-eyed discovery conversation. This includes talking through campaign goals and having what can sometimes be uncomfortable discussions about capacity and preparedness across teams.

Every person should be able to answer What? When? How? Why?

And, importantly, the business needs to be a place where the team feels comfortable being honest even when it’s hard. To have those conversations, the culture needs to support professional pushback without fear of backlash or dismissiveness. (Think: Product raising a concern about a launch date or Marketing flagging operational inefficiencies.)

A good rule of thumb is making sure your business can honestly answer Yes to both of these questions: Does everyone have a voice? Do they feel safe using it?

The answer is short and unglamorous. To ensure alignment, teams need to sit down and have an honest, clear-eyed discovery conversation.

Operational Readiness Checklist: Is Your Business Prepared for a Successful Marketing Push?

The questions below will vary based on business model, so the items below are just a starting point. Once you have your customized checklist established, keep in mind that if any question generates internal pushback or hesitation, pausing marketing until that’s resolved might be your best bet.

Communications + Internal Clarity

Everyone on the team should be able to answer questions about the campaign (and, if applicable, the new product/service) the same way. 

• Answer this question in one sentence: What are we promising, and to whom?
• Does everyone on the team agree? (across levels and organizational teams)
• Can everyone on the team repeat the same answers if asked?
• Are all execution and support teams trained on expectations? (marketing channel teams, sales, customer service, front desk or counter teams, etc.)

Alignment on Objectives

• Is everyone aligned on campaign goals? (retention, new client acquisition, education, awareness, etc.)
• Is everyone aligned on KPIs? (both what the metrics are and the target numbers)

Operations + Accountability

Once the business is clear on goals, run a quick audit of operational capacity, asking questions like:

• If X new customers walk through the front door, do we have inventory to support them?
• If X new service leads come in this week, who owns them — at every stage?
• What does the hand-off look like?
• What does follow-up look like?
• What happens in the first 5 minutes? 30 minutes? Hour? Day? Week?
• Do we have capacity to serve X% increase in customers while also maintaining product and service quality?

What if My Business Doesn’t Meet the Checklist Criteria?

Don’t let missing some checklist items discourage you. The good news is that you have new information — and information can help make action meaningful.

So what next?

1. Build up the foundation first. (For us, this is the Stabilize phase.)
2. Run small, targeted testing campaigns to help make gaps more visible. Look for things like missed handoffs, internal communication or training gaps, and products not meeting customer needs.
3. Fill those gaps, and realign the strategy across teams if needed.
4. Then scale marketing.

It’s important to note that Not quite ready doesn’t necessarily mean Don’t market yet. Marketing when your business isn’t 100% ready can be a really useful stress test, especially for an early-stage business.

And there’s a lot to be learned from running a test campaign, even after a thorough business audit. Sometimes, It should work in theory just isn’t enough. Sometimes, we need to actually see the process in action to expose gaps we didn’t know were there.

Key Takeaway

Turning to marketing to drive business interest is natural and logical — it’s the team’s primary role. 

But a pause to assess the organization’s foundation and internal alignment is critical for overall success. Start with a philosophy like: Let’s plan for marketing to be a success — are we ready for it?

Taking that minute to audit your business and make sure teams are aligned helps to make that marketing spend really count — both for the campaign and for long-term brand reputation and goodwill. Make sure that gift box has something in it.

If you’re looking for help shoring up your business foundations or could use some fresh, objective eyes for a business audit, get in touch! We’d love to hear what you’re working on and how we can help.