what will and won't give you a quick cash injection

I’m pushing back hard on that instinct, because when cash flow is tight, your priority isn’t prettier marketing. Your priority is leads, sales conversations, and a clear conversion plan you can run right now.

I walk you through what to pause first (hiring, heavy tech, endless automations, and building a brand-new offer) and what to do instead to stabilize revenue fast. We talk client retention strategies that create immediate wins, how to rekindle warm leads and past clients without sounding desperate, and how to sell more often without being spammy. You’ll hear the difference between inbound marketing and outbound lead generation, plus practical ways to restart outreach through DMs, email, and direct follow-up when your pipeline feels “dry” but probably isn’t.

Then we shift into the Think Like a CMO mindset that changes everything: stop asking how to grow and start asking how to convert with what you already have. I also share a simple weekly checklist to identify your warmest leads, tighten your messaging and calls to action, and start new conversations that lead somewhere. When revenue stabilizes, you get the breathing room to invest in long-term growth like a rebrand, a new website, and better systems without making reactive decisions.

If you want a calm, strategic marketing plan for the next 7 days, hit play, then subscribe, share this with a business friend who needs it, and leave a review so more small business owners can find the show.

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Transcript

Stop Random Acts Of Marketing

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome back to Think Like a CMO, the podcast for entrepreneurs who are ready to stop doing random acts of marketing and to start thinking like the chief marketing officer your business actually needs. I'm your host, Sarah Gemmel. I'm a marketing strategist and consultant for small business owners to help them build a marketing ecosystem that consistently brings in results and quality leads. Around here, we talk about what it really looks like to step into your role as the CMO, to start seeing the big picture, to lead your marketing with strategy, and to stop wasting time on productive busy work that isn't actually getting you anywhere. This is all about no fluff, honest conversations, potent strategies, and practical insights that you can use right now to make your marketing work smarter, not harder. As more seasoned small business owners, solopreneurs, we've all been there where revenue dips, panic sets in, right? You lose your biggest client, or people just naturally start to complete, or maybe you've been selling products like hotcakes, and all of a sudden you're not. You're feeling like you need to do something fast because we need revenue, right? To keep the lights on, literally and figuratively. But the wrong move at this point in time can make things worse. And this episode is to help you think about your next step, your next move more strategically and less reactively. You've been in the game for a little while now, right? You've seen the ebbs and the flows of business. But I want you to be able to make a data-based informed decision about what your next move is. Not emotional, not reactive. We all know, yes, you have to spend money to make money. It's a cliche because it's true. But spending money on the wrong thing is not going to help you make money quickly. And it's not going to help fix the revenue problem. Right? It's kind of dangerously incomplete because the goal is to spend money in the right place on the things that are going to directly and quickly help generate that revenue to give you the cash flow, right? Now, arguably, most of these things that we'll talk about do have a financial return on investment. But there's a lot of them that are like indirect return on investment, or there's a lot of them that are maybe a long game. So where you're spending your time, energy, and finances at this point is really, really important.

What Not To Do First

SPEAKER_00 2:35

The first and foremost thing that I want you to keep in mind is what is not the priority first when your revenue has dipped. Okay. When revenue has dipped, it's really easy to think that like a brand new website's gonna fix your problem or a rebrand is gonna fix your problem. But what we need to look at is what is going to help bring in leads, prospects, and ultimately revenue quickly. Okay, so hiring is not gonna bring in revenue directly. Rebranding or a new website is great and wonderful down the line. It's a long game, it's got a great ROI. I'm not against it, but when revenue has dipped, that is not the priority, right? New software, new tech, more automations, more tools, those are not going to fix your revenue problem. It's only going to suck your time away from revenue generating activities, especially when it comes to tech, right? We all know trying to build a website, set up tech automations, it's very time consuming if you're doing it yourself. And it's spending money if you're having someone else do it. Neither one is a good fit when revenue has dipped, right? You also don't need to build a brand new offer. Again, it's a lot of time spent on the back end, unless there is something innately wrong with the existing offer. It's so misaligned, it doesn't fit the target market. If there's something like fundamentally wrong with the offer, then there's an exception to this rule. But if the offer is solid, you have proof of concept, you know the offer works, you know there's a need in the market, you know that there are people actively seeking this solution for the service or the product, you know that it's a really good offer, then we're not changing it. We're not building a new offer. The number one thing I hear from small business owners when their revenue has dipped and they're like, but Sarah, I just can't financially invest in marketing sport right now because I'm going to have someone redo my website first. I'm gonna go through a rebrand first. It's usually these things that look good. They really do look good. And long term, yes, they're great and they're wonderful and they're important. It also feels productive, it feels busy, but ultimately it's safe and it's comfortable. They get to avoid the harder, more direct conversations, but it's also distracting them from the real problem, right? The long game, yes, is important, but right now, when revenue has dipped, that's not your top priority.

Quick Cash Flow Injection Moves

SPEAKER_00 5:11

But here's what is the things that are going to give you a cash flow injection quickly is the top priority. Okay, so how can we start conversations, rekindle conversations? How can we get clients to renew or upgrade? Talk about the lowest hanging fruit, the people who are already paying you, right? Give them an upgrade option, give them the next offer, give them some kind of retention option so that they can stay in your world, right? Going back to your previous leads, your previous clients, following up with them, getting that conversation back in the works. This is one of those things that like people, I hear people say all the time, Sarah, I don't chase, I attract. Right? That's kind of entitled to think that you don't have to do any outbound lead generation, especially when your revenue has dipped. And I say that with love, okay? But in order to run a successful business, you will have to have some outbound lead generation in addition to inbound lead generation. So the difference being inbound is they come to you, outbound is you go to them to start the conversation. And there are a lot of different ways that you can rekindle these conversations. You can create a piece of content that's really designed to move them into a sales decision, to get them in your DMs, to get them on your calendar. You can do a direct outreach in the DMs, you can call them, you can text them, email them, like do that direct outreach to them personally. You can also send an email to your list that is designed to bring them into right, your sales call or whatever. So if I was looking for cash flow quickly, I would create an email that gives value and talks about something so specific to my offer and then ties into the offer so perfectly. And the CTA is like, hey, get on my calendar, let's talk about your market. So doing outreach, right? Creating that piece of content that's actually going to get them into a sales conversation. It might perform less, usually it does because it's a direct promotion. It's not meant to do well off from vanity metrics, but it's meant to move those lurkers into a buying decision, the outreach, the individual conversations, right? And then we also touched on retention of existing clients, rekindling the conversations with old leads, ultimately looking at how often are you actually talking about your offer? How often are you actually selling? And I get like, you know, but Sarah, I don't want to be spammy and I don't want to be salesy. I appreciate that. And you can do both things, right? You can talk about your offer and feed your pipeline and bring in revenue and not be spammy. So we have to ditch that mindset because in trying to not be salesy or spammy, you're over here with no revenue wondering where the hell the next client's gonna come from. So that's also

Borrow An Audience For Leads

SPEAKER_00 8:07

not working. Something else that you can do to build traction quickly is to borrow an audience, right? So can you guess speak? Podcasts is a little bit of a long game because usually they have like a wait time for the time that they actually launch the podcast, but getting on other people's podcasts pretty regularly is a great way to keep the pipeline fed, right? The other thing that you can do is you can guest speak directly in communities. You can speak on virtual stages, in-person stages, you can do any kind of collaboration with your existing network. You can do an email swap, a live swap. You could, if you're in person, you can put up a table at someone else's business. You can go to a vendor event, you can go to an in-person event, a virtual event. Get yourself out there. Go back, not necessarily to a new networking community. I want you to go back to a networking community that you've already been to with people who you already know, relationships that are already established, because you're gonna have a less lead time. You're not there to sell them, but they're gonna you're gonna have a least words, words, Sarah. You're gonna have a lesser lead time to get a referral or a collaboration or another opportunity from referral partners that you already have an established relationship with. You've already started to build the no like trust factor with them. So when you come in and you say, I'm looking to collaborate on this, this, or this, I'm looking for a referral for this type of person, you're more likely to get it because you've already warmed up those referral partners. It's very much like cold leads versus warm leads, right? The mindset shift that really starts to change everything,

Shift From Growth To Conversion

SPEAKER_00 9:52

right? We talk about in this podcast all the time thinking more like a CMO. That CMO mindset shift that's gonna change this for you, instead of looking at how can I grow, I want you to ask yourself and how can you convert with what you already have, right? How can you get yourself out there more and do the uncomfortable things first? Do the things that are actually going to generate leads and get people into a sales conversation quickly and be able to make the professional expert decision on what is long-term growth and good for later. But right now, the important thing is a cash flow injection. The important thing is to fill this spot in my client roster so that I can still pay all my bills, right? Growth is where you're doing things like the rebrand and the website, you know, building a new offer, building out more tech integrations, all those things. But your conversion right now is your right now problem. Your sales right now is your right now problem. When you can give yourself the revenue stability, you give yourself breathing room to then invest in other areas. And I think I feel like right now in our world, a lot of people are so anti-hustle culture. But when revenue has dipped, and you know what I'm talking about, if you've made it this far, you already know. I'm talking like it's dipped dangerously low where it's stressing you the fuck out. We we're not worried about anti-hustle, okay? When revenue has dipped to this point, there's gonna be a season where you have to bootstrap, do things manually, do things the traditional old school way, and hustle a little bit more so that you can build that revenue back up so that hopefully you don't have to deal with this as severely or as frequently in the future. Revenue will dip, yes, it's part of business, right? And then once the cash flow, the revenue stabilizes, then you can look at things like hiring, rebranding, uh building new websites,

Bootstrapping Without The Shame

SPEAKER_00 12:00

building the offers, all the things that we talked about. But first and foremost, I want you to ask yourself what is going to bring in the leads the most consistently. It's the front-facing content, it's the outreach messages, it's where you're already showing up for networking. If you're already speaking on stages, that should be bringing in lead flow, right? If you're already creating content on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, that should be creating lead flow. It's important for me to specify that things like the hiring, the tech, the rebranding, the website, those things are not bad investments. They're just poorly timed when you're in this more mode of survival. When I get a new client who's coming and their revenue is dipped, they've invested with me to help them rebuild revenue, but also to build a marketing strategy that has longevity. We do look at these long-term growth type of things, but we also look at how can we bring in this cash flow quickly in the first 30 days. And it is almost entirely made up of improving the existing content that's getting put out, really revisiting the messaging, the calls to action, like all these things that go into content, right? We also look at not only doing the outreach, but making sure the outreach is so dialed in, so well written, and it's actually getting people to respond. And looking at who's sitting here in the pipeline hot, ready to either renew, ready to buy, needs a little bit of something to just move forward. Chances are your pipeline is not totally dry. You have these people who are kind of just sitting here lurking, waiting for you to give them that next step. That's a lot of times what I'm helping

The First 30 Days Plan

SPEAKER_00 13:45

my clients with when they come to me in this particular season. And this is exactly why I am typically an investment for my clients when they're when they're in this season, right? Because we can look at the things of longevity, but I help them get into this CMO mode. I help them look at their marketing as a whole and to start making these database decisions, to start really making great decisions on what's worth investing now, what's worth investing in later, right? What's gonna build the visibility now, what's gonna generate the leads now? What do we need to do to set ourselves up for success in six months from now? All of these things are important and they can run at the same time. Here's

Weekly Checklist And Clear CTAs

SPEAKER_00 14:29

a quick little checklist that you can give yourself to do this week, okay? This week, if you were my client, I would tell you to do this. I want you to list out your 10 warmest leads, whether that's DM conversations, inquiries, uh sales calls. I want you to reach out to three of your past clients, invite them back with a relevant offer based on whatever their progress was, whatever they came to you for, whatever that next step is, whatever their feedback was. Then I want you to audit your current offer and ask yourself it is if it's clearly positioned to be sold, and if the messaging is so dialed in and on point. Are you talking about the offer enough? And are you talking about the offer with the right messaging? And then I want you to do five outreach in the next week. I next week, I want you to start five conversations with new people. Do not pitch them, do not send them links, do not send them deliverables, but just start a conversation and maybe invite them into something free. We do a little bit of cold outreach right now where we invite people into a marketing audit, or I might invite them to my networking group, or if they're someone I've met before, I might offer them like a freebie, like download PDF or whatever. I want you to figure out what is this offer that you can sell right now without having to create a whole bunch of things. So we're not gonna sell a course that's not built yet. And the last thing on your checklist is to book a call with me, okay? Get on my calendar, get yourself in for a clarity call. It's in the show notes. You and I need to talk about your marketing. We need to strategize exactly what your next moves in marketing are together so that you can decrease the severity and the frequency of these revenue dips because it's really easy to get caught up in client work and then your marketing falls to the wayside, right? You stop prospecting because you're so busy with client work and then clients fall off and there's no prospects, there's no pool of leads ready to convert. That's where this comes from. So, in that longevity piece, we address that. So it's like, how can we make money right now and how can we make sure that we continue to make money consistently moving forward? You need to get on my calendar. Okay, get on my calendar, let's have a clarity call and let's really look at your marketing strategy and make sure it's not just all over the place. As always, thank you so much for tuning in to Think Like a CMO. Like I say, get on my calendar. But if you found this episode at all helpful outside of booking a call with me, please make sure that you're following the show so that you don't miss any future episodes and leave us a review. One of the easiest free ways to support this podcast and to really show your appreciation if you love it, is to leave us a review. All right, you'll find everything you need in the show notes. And just remember you're already the CMO of your business. It's just time for you to start thinking like one.