Sales Budget 2023: How to Plan for the Next Year’s LinkedIn Lead Generation Success
A sales budget is a tool businesses use to plan and track their sales activities and revenue. It is typically created monthly or quarterly and includes detailed information on the expected sales volume, prices, mix, and expected sales revenue.
However, despite all the yearly planning, studies show that sales and marketing teams waste $2 trillion annually on excess sales, lost revenue potential, and general and administrative costs. Unfortunately, this doesn’t help sales managers justify their budget needs and present their cases to the top management.
Because we know how overwhelming it can feel to create a comprehensive sales budget from scratch, we have compiled this helpful guide on planning an effective budget for next year’s LinkedIn lead generation success.
After reading this post, you will understand:
- Why now is the right time to invest in LinkedIn as an essential part of your sales strategy
- Discover what makes a successful lead generation campaign
- Understand how to plan your yearly sales budget
- Unveil the common expenses that you need to keep your eye on
- Discover 5 ways to optimize your LinkedIn lead generation budget
Planning for 2023 Sales Team Budgets
Building an effective strategy that keeps your organization growing starts with a plan — and don’t forget the money to run it. However, creating a sales budget isn’t just as easy as adding the expected sales revenue for the year. That’s why we’ve prepared a granular approach that breaks down your sales and marketing spending.
How to Plan for a Yearly Sales Budget
As the sales team manager, you need to think about where you are now, what comes next and how you can make sure your lead-generation efforts continue to drive desirable results.
Here’s how to plan for a yearly sales budget:
Prepare the Necessary Financial Documents (Income Statements, P&L Statements, and Cash Flow Statements)
Income statements summarize the company’s overall performance because it is not advisable to spend money you don’t have.
The company’s balance sheet outlines how much equity and assets it has against its liabilities (debts and loans) in a set period. Next, fetch the year’s cash flow statements to understand how much streamed into the company from its sales activities against how much you spent to realize your sales quota.
Remember, these financial documents should be dated for the current year.
Pick a Strategy for Calculating Your Sales Budget
There are several approaches to calculating sales budgets. For instance, you can calculate it as a percentage of the total revenue. You can calculate the sales budget by channel/product/service where you have several products or services in your pipeline. That involves taking count of your products, inventory, and prices.
While at it, account for any changes that may be implemented in the coming year. Are you raising prices or lowering them in the coming year? Will you end some services or update any features? Take such changes into account since they directly affect your sales budget estimate.
Select the Period
In your case, the time period will depend on what products and services you sell. High-value offerings usually have an annual, biannual, or monthly time budget. On the other hand, a monthly budget will suffice for low-priced offerings. Seasonal products will also benefit from a monthly or quarterly period.
While no specific time period fits all, it’s best to avoid an unnecessarily long time period to avoid inaccurate results.
Compare Your Sales Data to a Past Sales Budget
A quick look into past sales data provides insights into what to expect in the coming period. Look out for emerging trends, as these help create a more accurate prediction for the coming year. But don’t stop there.
Competitors in your industry have their sales budget prediction data which you can tap into to make your predictions even more accurate.
By the way, it helps to track current market trends because these will affect your sales budget estimate. How are other businesses responding to the current trends? Are they shifting to digital systems for collaboration amidst a global pandemic? Perhaps your company could benefit from that.
Either way, keep these changes in mind to get more refined results.
Create Your Sales Budget
Now you have all you need to create an accurate budget that reflects every possible outcome. You should be able to create a budget plan that details the expected revenues from selling goods and services.
Other important things to keep in mind:
- Don’t forget to track sales and marketing expenses, including the cost of an outsourced lead generation agency and limited-time offer discounts that turn into expenses for your company.
- The objective of the sales budget is not to represent a conclusive sales figure. It only represents a solid estimate of the expected expenditures and returns.
- Update your variables as often as needed. Often things change in a sales budget. For instance, a new trend may trigger action from the company’s management, which you must keep up to date with to avoid inaccurate numbers.
Implementing constant updates requires smooth collaboration with other departments in the company.
Common Expenses Areas
A lot goes into running a successful campaign, and as promised, here are the key spending areas you’ll need to keep an eye on:
Fixed Expenses
Fixed costs are costs that don’t change and are incurred regardless of the company’s sales volume. Such costs include:
- Employee salaries
- Business taxes
- Insurance
- Rent and property lease costs.
Sales teams incur short-term and long-term fixed costs that should be accounted for when calculating the net sales prediction for the coming year.
Variable Expenses
Variable expenses change with the sales volume output, i.e., a rise in the sales volume leads to a corresponding rise in the variable costs. Some variable costs include:
- Commissions
- Product delivery costs
- Cost of raw materials.
Variable expenses are considered short-term since they can be easily altered when needed. For instance, the company may cut off bonus commissions for the sales team when losses are incurred.
Other expenses incurred by sales teams have been broken down by activity (if relevant) and estimated cost as follows:
- Creating and implementing advertising campaigns, $10,000 – $30,000 per month. This includes setting up your ads and monitoring their performance.
- Creating and managing new company landing pages on LinkedIn, $0 – $2,000. Company pages exist solely to create awareness and generate leads and should include a compelling call to action to encourage visitors to provide their contact information.
- Creating a YouTube channel, $1,000 – $5,000. YouTube is another powerful lead-generation and nurturing tool. You can use it to create videos demonstrating how your product works and why it’s a good investment.
- Hiring a professional videographer to create a training video, $1,000 – $5,000. Creating training videos that walk potential customers through your product can be an excellent way to increase sales and reduce customer support costs.
- Creating a blog with valuable content resources, $1,000 – $2,000. Blogging about the company and its products is a long-term lead-generation strategy. An active blog can be used to increase your website’s rankings. Hiring a professional copywriter to help with your content can cost anywhere from $500 – $5,000 per month. Investing in a professional copywriter can significantly impact your lead-generation efforts.
- Lead generation software to help with your digital sales and marketing efforts, $10 – $5,000. Investing in lead generation software such as Outreachly helps you generate leads effortlessly from only $3 per day. It frees up more time for your sales team to focus on closing more deals.
More costs are involved based on your company and the nature of its activities. Be sure to identify all the expenses incurred to get an accurate prediction.
How to Plan a Budget for LinkedIn Lead Generation
There’s no doubt that LinkedIn is an invaluable lead generation tool, with 80% of marketers affirming that the platform is an effective lead generation tool for lead generation. Additionally, 80% of B2B leads coming from social media arrive from LinkedIn.
But how much goes into a LinkedIn lead generation campaign? Generally, it costs $40 to $190 to generate a B2B lead. Of course, this amount varies by industry, with lead acquisition costs exceeding $200 in the technology space. If you’re considering a paid LinkedIn ad campaign, you should expect to spend between $1000 and $5000 monthly.
Here’s what you need to know to create a sales and marketing budget plan for LinkedIn lead generation:
Set Clear Goals
Each LinkedIn lead generation campaign should be based on a clear goal, whether that is:
- Creating brand awareness
- Attracting top talent for open roles at your company
- Boosting engagement and website visits
- Or simply generating new leads for your business.
Setting clear goals means allocating your resources more effectively to successful campaigns.
Set Your Maximum Spend
How much are you willing to spend on lead generation? Most sales and marketing teams don’t have all the money they need to accomplish every activity on their list.
Consider setting a reasonable lifetime budget that can be justified by the sales activities on your list. A lifetime budget refers to the amount of money you wish to spend throughout the length of your campaign. Consider splitting your budget between the campaign’s objectives.
Choose Your KPIs
Your key performance indicators should be based on the campaign’s main goal. For instance, click-through rates (CTR) can measure an awareness campaign. Similarly, a justified lead generation campaign should be backed by increased conversion rates, lower cost per lead, increased qualified lead volume, increased booked meetings, and so on.
Be careful not to fall into the vanity metrics trap. Vanity metrics, such as the number of followers and unique visitors, do not represent your campaign’s performance.
Now that you know what you want, how you want to achieve it, and how you will measure your success, you can finally create an informed LinkedIn lead generation plan.
5 Ways to Optimize Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Budget
The rise of LinkedIn as a powerful B2B lead generation platform has created new opportunities for businesses to reach their target audiences. However, with the increased competition on the site, it’s important to be strategic about how you spend your LinkedIn lead generation budget.
Here are the steps to optimize your LinkedIn lead gen budget so that you’re getting the most bang for your buck:
1. Set Your Objectives and Segment Your Audience
Again, every budget should be based on clear objectives, whether building awareness or increasing website traffic.
Another thing to consider when setting up your objectives is the size of your target audience. Ideally, you want to target a small group of people best suited to your product/service. Segmenting your audience into smaller, relevant groups maximizes your campaign’s efficiency.
2. Target Your Ideal Customer with Laser Precision
The second step to optimization is targeting. And when it comes to targeting on LinkedIn, you should have a clear picture of your target audience. That also means their specific pain points, what companies they work for, what groups they’re a part of, and more.
Once you know your ideal customer, you can create content and ads that speak directly to them. You can also use LinkedIn’s targeting options to ensure that your content and ads are only being served to people likely to be interested in what you have to say.
3. Use a Multi-Pronged Approach
A multi-pronged approach means using a combination of free and paid solutions to reach your desired results. For example, you might use organic posts and Sponsored Content to promote gated content like an eBook or white paper. By using both organic and paid solutions, you can reach more people while maximizing the conversion rate of your content offers.
4. Create Compelling Content
If you want people to take notice of your brand on LinkedIn – and eventually convert into leads – you need to create compelling content that speaks to their specific needs. Here’s the thing: Generic content doesn’t work on LinkedIn. You need to create targeted, helpful, and relevant content if you want key decision-makers to engage with it.
5. Test, Test, Test
The only way to know what’s working and what’s not is by testing different content types, outreach formats, target audiences, and more. Then, once you’ve found what works best for your business, double down on those efforts and continue testing so that you can continue fine-tuning your strategy over time.
How Outreachy Helps Make Your LinkedIn Lead Generation Budget Cost-Effective
Sales success depends on generating leads, but finding effective lead-generation strategies can be risky. With Outreachly’s No-Risk Sales Service, you can take the guesswork out of lead generation and confidently order the number of leads you need to hit your sales targets.
Our fully managed lead generation service delivers hot, sales-ready leads that have responded to the outreach via positive replies and booked meetings. And because we’re so confident in our ability to deliver results and only charge for leads delivered, you can be sure you’re getting value for money. Plus, our service is backed by a 100% money-back guarantee, so you can try us with complete peace of mind.
So if you’re looking for a smarter, more effective way to generate sales leads, No-Risk Sales Service is the perfect solution!
Conclusion
As the new year approaches, now is the time to start planning for your LinkedIn lead generation success. One of the best ways to do this is to review your successes and failures from the past year. What worked well? What didn’t work so well? Use this information to adjust your sales and marketing budget plan and LinkedIn strategy for the coming year.