Update your sales strategy to harness new growth opportunities

A marketing and sales plan should be an important component of your overall business plan, and you need to keep it updated as market conditions change.

For example, Congress recently passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, and President Donald Trump has signed it into law. Market conditions and buying behaviors for propane are predicted to improve because of this legislation. Conventional propane and renewable propane are likely to be a bigger part of a more level energy playing field that had previously favored electricity in many parts of the country. Consumer attitudes toward propane are likely to shift more in your favor soon. Is your marketing and sales plan ready for that shift?

Here are some of the considerations you should be thinking about when developing or updating your marketing and sales plan to take advantage of the incoming changes to the energy landscape.

• Marketing and sales plan updates: Are your overall plans geared toward maximum customer retention and new customer growth in more favorable market conditions? It may be time to reassess your net sales goals and adjust your plans accordingly.
• Reassessment of net sales goals: Customers gained minus customers lost equals net customer growth. Improved market conditions will likely have a positive effect on your marketing area, and it may warrant adjusting your net customer growth forecast.
• Target market expansion options: Is your business ready and able to profitably expand into other select markets? For example, if your primary market is residential propane, should you consider expanding into the autogas or power generation market?
• Adding levels of service: If your standard level of service is residential bulk propane delivery, should you consider expanding your propane delivery services to include other markets such as cylinder exchange, on-site cylinder fill or refill stations? Analyze those markets to make sure there is enough volume projection versus investment to make it a viable addition to your business.
• Compare with the competition: Analyze the competitive landscape and make sure you are offering a unique selling proposition that meets the needs of the evolving energy market in your area.
• Marketing budget review: You may want to do a mid-year marketing budget review to make sure you have enough resources allocated to achieve your net customer growth forecast. I’ll review a wide range of options for establishing or updating a marketing budget in a future column, but for now, here are a few tips.

If you are working with an outside marketing agency, never let this agency establish your marketing budget with the proposal they give you. You need to determine your marketing budget range before considering any proposals. A good rule of thumb for marketing budget expense is $25 to $45 per existing customer. In other words, if you have 2,000 active customers, your total marketing budget could be $50,000 to $90,000, depending on how passive or aggressive you want to be to address the newly forecasted customer growth in your area.

For most marketers, the two most expensive components of a marketing budget are dedicated personnel and digital. Anyone on your staff who works full- or part-time on marketing counts toward the marketing budget. Staff members who spend half their time on marketing and are paid $50,000 annually should have half their salary ($25,000) applied to the marketing budget.

The digital expense component of your marketing budget will include your website and social media management, another large marketing expense often done by an outside marketing firm. Additional marketing expenses should fall in line with your revised budget.

The propane industry should take advantage of the improving market conditions for propane. This is your opportunity to help make that happen for your customers, your employees and your business.

Tom Jaenicke is known as “the propane guy” and works as an adviser and strategist to the energy industry. Check out his work at atomiksolutions.com. Tom is a propane industry veteran of several decades and can be reached at tom@atomikenergysolutions.com or by calling 810-252-7855.

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