5 Financial Blind Spots That May Be Preventing You From Making More Money

Money can often be the barrier between sticking where you are or jumping to the next level. This includes having or not having a budget, using it correctly, hidden income or wrong goals — all of which affect your growth. These four common secrets have helped my company take our clients to the next level.

1. Financial transparency of ROI

The first blindspot that we often notice in new clients is not having a clear reporting connection between your tools, such as ads and CRM like HubSpot, to see which channels bring the most important return on investment (ROI). Do you know your best performing channels? Or your best performing sales copy? What is the most open document that leads to a closed deal?

And we're not just talking about marketing and sales; this applies to many connected platforms – for example, closed revenue or your ERP systems. When things are not connected, they are separated and isolated. You end up going blind. Without connecting your marketing tools with your revenue tools, be it CRMs, financial platforms, or ERPs, to name a few, there is a disconnect, and arms and legs end up going in different directions.

Here's a simple example we see all the time: If you knew one channel was driving a lot of deals with a 75% quick conversion rate, wouldn't you invest more time and energy in that channel than one with only a 10% conversion rate. ? Most people don't want to share the company's revenue numbers, but all that information informs other departments; without sharing these income numbers, your money secret is kept in hidden silos.

Related: I Hit $100 Million in Annual Revenue With More Visibility – Here Are 3 Strategies That Helped Me Succeed

2. Strategic investment to avoid conflicting areas

Another financial blind spot is not investing in marketing. We had prospects come in with no budget and no internal marketing team, but we wanted to grow 150% and spend a total of $1,000. I wish to achieve growth like this was possible, but unfortunately, it is not. The old saying that you get what you pay for, or it takes money to make money, is true. Your investment goals should align with your growth goals. The value of an investment should not only be measured in terms of short-term gains, but also in terms of long-term investment in growth.

You can never measure an HR department by the number of employees. However, if you look at the whole picture of longevity among many other important KPIs, You would not use the HR department for a few months. It is something that is permanent and needs care and attention. Marketing isn't the same – if you measure marketing only by the number of leads, you're missing the full picture. Marketing helps push leads through nurturing campaigns, creates automation, leads scoring, creates new campaigns and tests, supports sales enablement activities and more. The purchase cycle is rarely a linear click-and-buy unless we're talking about Amazon.

That said, everyone has budgets, margins and highways they need to stay within. I am by no means saying to throw your budget to the wind, but your goal should be in line with your budget. If you have modest growth goals, be realistic about the budget needed to get there. Set small incremental goals but stay on track for long-term growth.

Related: You Won't Have a Tight Budget Until You Follow These 5 Tips

3. Data-driven decisions to save money

Another secret that costs companies money is spending without data to back it up. We had a company asking about a new website, full blast, new navigation, new content, new page layouts, moving to a new CMS, new theme and functions. They said they had a budget of $75,000 for the entire project. In theory, it sounds good, right? Are you willing to invest? Check out. Got a budget? Check out. Do you know what they want the end result to be? Check out. But when we asked them the next question, they looked at us like we were crazy, “Do you have data to support the changes you want to make?” Are you using a tool like Hotjar to see real user data behind how these proposed changes will affect your existing inquiries and the only source the sales team has been using for leads?

The answer was no. When the heat map is covered, you know what happens? Well, they were looking to build that new navigation and restore the old one – about 90% of their traffic was going to two pages on their site directly from the navigation, both of which they originally wanted to remove. In this case, it's not just about having money but also about making sure that the decisions you make about budgeting are informed by real data: user data, sales data, marketing data and so on. The more experienced you are with closing the loop on your data, the better your end result will be.

Related: Want to Be Better at Making Decisions? Here are 5 Steps to Better Data-Driven Business Decisions

4. Modern marketing channels to drive growth

What can cost you more is using old-school channels that don't have the ability to measure. Companies have spent the last decade on traditional marketing channels and are shifting to digital. The company's historical growth depends on things like trade shows, print, postcards and online magazines. We ask you what ROI you've seen for each channel, and rarely can they share a specific revenue number and say it's for product promotion. Some of the budgets can be over 50 to 100 thousand dollars spent on these traditional methods, but there is no ROI attached, yet they continue with it.

When the pandemic happened, we saw a huge influx of businesses switching from bootstrapping to digital. Lockdown changed everything; there were no more trade shows, no more door knocks and no one to pick up the mail or faxes every day. It made traditional sales channels challenging and outdated and forced a new level of openness to trying new ways of getting work done. In the example of using online magazine ads there are many ways to capture them, we can use UTM tracking, referral analysis or create a custom landing page for offers and capture leads directly. Without moving them to a landing page or form, you rely solely on online publications to get leads and statistics. We've had people show just a list of names, no emails to be tracked, or only show a random number of visitors to the page, not a single name. It is important to know what they will provide in reporting and tracking when publishing or using traditional channels. The rule of thumb is to use links and tools that use old-school methods into technology and not to spend blindly on channels that don't measure up.

Stop wasting time, energy and income on these blind spots. They have simple solutions, so you can avoid them and focus on growing your business!