Mike Clemmons,
Bytecafe Consulting
When It Rains, It POURS!
The day I arrived in Nashville for Robin Robins’ Boot Camp, I found out we were losing our largest client. A couple of months later, we lost another sizable client. Then another. To put this massive loss of revenue in perspective, a year earlier, these three clients represented nearly $500,000 in revenue and over $30,000 a month in recurring revenue. That was nearly ONE-THIRD of our total revenue…GONE! We started our year at $95,000 in MRR and watched as it quickly plummeted to $68,000.
And the hits just kept on coming… Our service coordinator knocked on my door and asked if she could talk with me. She came in and closed the door. I knew what that meant: she put in her notice. If this had been the only employee I lost, no big deal. However, over the next three weeks, I had one employee come in each week and resign. I ended up also losing my marketing manager, my account manager and one of the best techs I ever had. In total, I lost 44% of my employees at one of the WORST possible times!
Marketing Tends To Fix Most Problems – We Added 36 New Leads And $22,000 In New MRR!
I’m not one to let things get me down. Sure, it will weigh heavily on me for a day, but then it’s back to work. While most business owners may slash the marketing budget after losing so much revenue, we dialed up the marketing considerably. We used Robin’s direct mail campaigns, including the Bad Date campaign and VoIP campaign, as well as cross-sell campaigns, referral campaigns and more.
As a result of our heavy marketing, in the last three months of the year, we had generated 36 leads. Those leads blossomed into business! In the first three months of the next year, we added $15,000 in new monthly recurring revenue. By the end of the year, we managed to get back up to $90,000 in MRR!
Our Website Generated 62 Leads And Our Newsletters Brought In $100K In New Business!
Our website is still one of our best sources of leads. Last year, we generated 62 leads from our website alone! We also implemented Google AdWords to a limited extent, which delivered 10 leads. Newsletters have always been a great source of leads for us. Last year, we received five quality leads from our newsletters that resulted in $100K in new revenue for us! Rounding out the list of where the majority of our leads come from are referrals. We love referrals because they are easy to close and often become long-term customers. Last year, we generated 15 new referrals!
This year is starting out fantastic because we utilize the marketing tools and strategies that have been provided to us by Robin and her team. We should EASILY grow our revenue, net profit and monthly recurring revenue by a full 20% this year!
