On this week’s episode of The Engaging Marketeer, as we start in January, a lot of businesses, and you might be one of them, will be thinking about their marketing. What are we going to do to attract clients this year? Where are we going to put our marketing spend?
Before any business starts thinking about marketing, before any business starts spending money on SEO, pay per click, Facebook ads, or joining networking groups, before you spend any money getting business in, I want to stress something.
We tell every single business that comes to us as a potential client this, especially those that want to spend money on SEO. You need to make sure you have a sales process first. If you do not have a sales process that works, all you are going to end up doing is spending money on marketing and wasting it.
If you go to a networking event, maybe you join a BNI group or something similar, and you do not have a sales process, you will be seen as the person who does not follow up on referrals.
That damages your reputation.
If you spend money on SEO, pay per click, Facebook ads, or email marketing, and leads start coming in through your website, but you are not able to follow them up properly, you will not make a return on investment. None of those leads will close. Everything gets confused, muddled, and messy.
I say this because I see so many businesses get this wrong. So many businesses.
Only recently, and I am not going to mention the company name because that would not be fair, someone asked me for a recommendation for a vehicle wrap company. That is where you have a car or van fully branded with printed graphics.
I was about to recommend a company we have used before. Before I could say the name, the person stopped me and said they did not want me to recommend that company. It was exactly who I was about to suggest.
I asked why. They told me they had spoken to them, they came out, measured up, and then never got back to them. They needed the work doing and heard nothing.
That got me thinking because I had heard this before about that same company. They are very good at what they do. The work they have done for us has been excellent. But I had now heard from multiple people that they never followed up.
They have been in a networking organisation for a very long time, possibly over twenty years, and they probably have no idea that their reputation among some members is that they do not get back to people. The reason is simple. They do not have a sales process.
They rely on emails and bits of paper to track who has asked for what and where quotes are up to. It is a mess, and it does not work.
If you do not have a sales process using some kind of software, some form of CRM, you will get into trouble. At Engage Web, we use Monday.com. It is not my favourite piece of software and there are parts I do not like, but it does what we need it to do.
If you do not have something like this in place, you will get into a mess. It is not just you that suffers either. The people who recommend you also have their reputation damaged.
I can no longer recommend that company, even though I know they do great work. I cannot risk someone coming back to me saying the company I recommended never responded, because I know that is likely to happen.
I had a similar situation years ago with a glamping site. High end accommodation, large yurts rather than caravans. We were talking to them about a website and marketing, and during those conversations they mentioned needing some maintenance work doing.
They needed doors realigning and some general woodwork across several units. I recommended a joiner I knew who was good at his job.
A couple of weeks later, I followed up about the website and asked how they got on with the joiner. They told me he never got back to them.
That really annoyed me because I had recommended someone who turned out to be unreliable. I spoke to the joiner the next day and asked how it was going. He said he needed to get back to them with a quote.
Another week passed and nothing happened. He had no sales process. Completely useless.
Unsurprisingly, we did not get the website project. By recommending someone unreliable, I damaged my own reputation because they assumed I might also be unreliable.
So you need to be very careful who you recommend.
I will stress this again. Before you spend any money on marketing in 2026, before you spend money on SEO, whether that is with Engage Web or someone else, before you spend money on Facebook ads, Google ads, email marketing, or networking groups, make sure you have a sales process.
Make sure you know what happens to referrals, leads, emails, and phone calls when they come in. They must be logged somewhere. There must be a clear process for following them up.
You are paying for these enquiries to come in. Whatever marketing you are doing, you are paying for it. If you lose them because you do not have a process, that costs you more money. Your cost per acquisition increases because you are wasting opportunities.
You also damage your reputation. People stop recommending you because you let others down in the past.
Get yourself a sales process. It is far more important than spending money on SEO if you do not have one. You will not hear many marketing agencies tell you this, but that is why we are so honest at Engage Web.
We tell you what you need to hear, not what you want to hear. Get your sales process sorted, then come back to us.
I will catch you on the next podcast.
About your host:
Darren has worked within digital marketing since the last century, and was the first in-house web designer for video games retailer GAME in the UK, known as Electronics Boutique in the States. After co-founding his own agency, Engage Web, in 2009, Darren has worked with clients around the world, including Australia, Canada and the USA.
iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/engaging-marketeer/id1612454837
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/darrenjamieson/
Engaging Marketeer: https://engagingmarketeer.com
Engage Web: https://www.engageweb.co.uk
