How to Transition Your Sales & Marketing from Growth to Maintenance

As a marketing and sales firm, our clients usually come to us focused on “getting more.” They need more customers, more revenue, to produce more product efficiently and with less costs. But when is it enough? When do you know you’re okay and don’t need to push for more clients or more revenue? Is it when you have 100% of the market share? Is it when your sales reps have no one left to close? As the CEO, it’s your job to recognize when you have made it to where you want to be. Once you have determined that point, it’s time to switch over to maintaining what you have built.

It can be tricky communicating this switch to your team. On one hand, you don’t want them to slow down and affect overall workflow, but on the other you want to give them time to adjust to the change. Just make sure to fully explain the process moving forward so everyone is on the same page. Also keep in mind that there is immense value in showing your team that you are letting up on the throttle a little bit to enjoy what you have built—and that you are allowing your team to do the same.

Maintenance mode in sales and marketing follows much of the same process as growth mode. The difference lies in your content, target audience, and call to action, which shifts the focus from your prospective buyers toward your existing customers. For example:

• Where you might have used a testimonial to paint a picture for a prospect, you would use a testimonial that speaks to an existing customer instead.
• Where you have spent time and resources targeting new customers, switch to engaging your existing customers.
• You will align your content and calls to action throughout the company by focusing on customer appreciation programs.

You will continue producing content through all of your inbound and outbound channels—but the audience, content and CTAs shift their targets while you are in maintenance mode vs. growth mode.
When you look at your strategic growth plan and decide that it’s time to focus on maintenance rather than growth, let us know. We spend a lot of time at 19 Oaks talking about business growth, but maintenance has its own strategy. We are here to help you create and implement it.