If you run a business and are good at it, you know how to think ahead. You’ve got your finger on the pulse of the business landscape: industry trends, your competition, your customers, your supply chain, and much more. And when it’s a bull market and the investment environment is rich, your marketing teams are moving ahead on your long-term strategies and goals. But what happens when the economy constricts? Many experts claim we are teetering on the edge of a recession. Sequoia Capital, who is famous for its market divining, states investment dollars in the economic downturn will tighten and go to businesses that are already turning a profit to achieve faster ROI. For smaller businesses with a shorter financial runway, recessions are a game of survival, and in a downturn, your short-term marketing tactics can eat your long-term strategies for breakfast.

Given the current environment, what if you took a break from long-term marketing programs? What if instead, you tried to help salespeople generate a sales pipeline and move it through their part of the funnel to close deals? Wouldn’t that be amazing?

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Here are four easy steps for marketers to help close more deals sooner, even in a recession:

1. Target the same audience salespeople are targeting right now

Account-Based Marketing (ABM) is a predominant marketing strategy used today. With ABM, you target a set of key accounts. When leads on those accounts reach a certain threshold of marketing engagement, denoted by a score, Marketing qualifies the lead and passes it to Sales to work to a closed deal. But handing Sales these leads is a little like Forest Gump’s box of chocolates: salespeople never know what they are going to get—whether those leads are hot or not. In lean times, consider narrowing your marketing approach: Instead of targeting an entire account or new accounts, target the contacts Sales is already engaging. This will help accelerate the existing pipeline and support deal closures.

2. Track person-based engagements and let Sales respond in real time

In ABM, there’s often a huge disconnect between a warm marketing lead and a Sales response. When you pass a lead to Sales that has been warmed, often Sales wastes precious time, beginning the process from scratch to determine who at the account are key influencers to begin building the relationship. One way around this is to track the person-based marketing engagements and automate a follow-up process. For instance, when a prospect clicks on an advertisement, you can trigger a one-on-one engagement with the appropriate sales representative to respond in a timely manner—even real time.

Advertising effectiveness relative to Sales response time

Timing and pipeline efficiency is critical. If marketing communication efforts are not immediately supported by Sales, even for a couple of days, there is a huge opportunity cost and diminishing returns on marketing efforts.

3. Don’t wait to hand off leads to Sales, work in parallel on them

At first, it seems as if ABM is a good process because you understand exactly what Marketing and Sales do independently to influence the funnel: Marketing generates and warms leads, and Sales builds relationships. Once the marketing team qualifies the lead, their job is done, and they refocus on other accounts. But because marketing work is not directly tied to sales results, the process could be much better. Marketing falls out of the funnel, precisely when Sales could use additional support to close deals. On the other side, if Sales waits for the marketing lead hand-off, precious time is lost in taking action. To correct this, Sales and Marketing should not divide the funnel with a lead pass-off in the middle, but instead work leads in parallel throughout the entire funnel.

4. Marketing and Sales use the same KPIs

By using a common set of metrics between Sales and Marketing, it will not only enable your marketing team to see how their work tangibly influences and improves sales, but it also will help break down the silos that result in pipeline inefficiencies.

When recession hits you need results now

At Influ2, we use these four steps in our sales and marketing efforts. To gauge our effectiveness, over the last nine to 10 months, we reached out to 2,500 buying groups at key accounts who had not yet been influenced by our advertising. We engaged these accounts with cold sales outreach only. In parallel, we reached out to 700 buying groups at key accounts. For this second pool of accounts, we used advertising along with sales outreach. The second audience had a 2.45X conversion rate over the cold audience. The result was $9.3M in the sales pipeline and roughly 60% of it was influenced by Marketing. When a recession hits, these are the kinds of numbers that will help you get through it.

Be nimble and carry on

We are in uncharted business territory with a lot of influences coming to bear on the market: geopolitical, supply chain, interest rates, inflation rates, consumer attitudes, and more. In this environment, it is best to have many tools in your toolbox that you can employ to help you bridge to brighter days. Taking a fresh look at how you can bring in quick returns is an essential survival tactic in a shaky economy. Creating better alignment and coordination between your Marketing and Sales teams is a great place to start.

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