What‘s Wrong With Revenue?: Recent Episodes
whatswrongwithrevenue
The answer to what‘s wrong with revenue is complicated. Revenue growth demands all aspects of marketing, sales, and customer service be perfectly aligned and firing on all cylinders. Learn how to hit your revenue numbers month in and month out. With practical stories and examples from companies who have achieved growth, this podcast is going to help CEOs get their companies to the next level.
I continued the conversation with Matt Sunshine, CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy and Leads G2. In this show, Matt and I debate new buyer journey models and how to use them to help clients get better results from both sales and marketing. Matt has his approach and I have ours, both approaches are eye-opening.
I’m joined by Matt Sunshine, CEO of the Center for Sales Strategy and Leads G2. Matt and I go deep on the changing way B2B buyers make their purchase decisions today and you don’t want to miss it. We sunset the traditional sales funnel created in 1890, and introduce the new Cyclonic Buyer Journey model which illustrates how B2B prospects make purchase decisions today. We talk about how marketing and sales professionals need to adapt their execution to take full advantage of these changes.
Tom Brady, LeBron James, and Tiger Woods all have something in common. They are widely considered the Greatest of All Time in their sport. But they didn’t get there by accident and it wasn’t raw talent that got them there either. It was hard work. A never-ending commitment and an investment of both time and money in their own professional development, training, conditioning, and expertise. They knew that to be the best, they needed to work with the best trainers, the best conditioning experts, the best sports therapists, and the best coaches. Not only that, they needed to invest their time and energy, not only during the season but ALL YEAR long, if they wanted to be the GOAT. You need to consider a similar approach to revenue generation and business growth. There are no shortcuts. There are no easy buttons. You need to work with the best, invest appropriately with both time and money and never, ever stop working to get to your goals. That’s how you grow your business.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What going “all in” means from a time and investment perspective
- How to make this your company’s top priority and get everyone focused on this one goal.
- Why your partners/agencies need you to be “all in” because they are already all in for you.
- How analytics help athletes track progress, the same way analytics can help you track your progress
- Why asking yourself the hard question is the first step, “Do you want to win the Super Bowl?”
You’ve seen this one million times. You might even be doing it. You land on a website and the only options are to schedule a call, book a demo, or get a quote. But I’m not ready for that step. I don’t want to talk to a sales rep yet. I’m still early in my buyer journey and I don’t know anything about your company other than I might want to do business with you someday. In short, I don’t know, like or trust you YET! Your marketing and specifically your website and educational content have to align with where I am in the buyer journey and it has to be strategically designed to help me get to know, like, and trust your company. The same goes for your sales process. If you start asking about sending a contract or proposal on your first call, you will get blocked. You have to earn their trust, get to know them and they have to get to know you. They have to like you before they’ll even consider going forward with your sales process. Everything you do should be designed to get them to know, like, and trust you.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How your website and educational content should be designed to get prospects to feel safe
- How your sales process should be designed to get your prospects to feel safe
- What exactly your sales reps can be doing to help prospects know, like, and trust you?
- How to measure whether prospects are feeling safe and how to respond when they’re not
- How to leverage customers who already feel safe to drive more revenue from current customers
We do this show because marketing isn’t getting easier. Generating revenue month after month isn’t getting easier. Unfortunately, it’s getting harder and it’s about to get even harder yet. At Square 2, we’ve seen it all. We’ve seen clients with quarantined lists, suspended Google accounts, suspended HubSpot accounts, and more. All because their marketing practices violated some of the new privacy and anti-spam-related regulations. A lot of martech companies are trying to get ahead of this and be responsible corporate citizens before the government cracks down and passes federal regulations. A lot of states are already passing their own state regulations. You have to be aware of what’s coming and how to deal with it before it gets here.
In this show, we’ll cover
- We’ll help you understand exactly what a cookie is and how it works
- We’ll look at the ways Google is changing its approach and what that means to marketers
- We’ll help you get ready for the new cookie-less world
- We’ll talk about how to get your data ready today, so it's easy once this major change takes place
- We’ll also talk about how a data platform for everything marketing and sales is a critical part of this complicated puzzle
Unfortunately, the world has conspired to make getting in touch with your best prospects much harder than it’s ever been before. You can’t call them because they’re not in their office. You can’t email them because they have spam filters or hidden email addresses. You can reach out to them on social media because their feeds are overrun with spammy outreach. You can get to them with content because they’re peppered with similar messages from similar companies. What do you do? During the show today, we’ll help you figure this out. We’ll break down four different types of campaigns inbound, outbound, demand generation and account-based so you know the pluses and minuses of all four.
When do you use Inbound? What should you expect from it? How does it work? Why does it work well and in what situations? The same for outbound, demand generation and account-based campaigns. Interestingly enough, it’s very possible you need all four, used in various situations and deployed correctly.
In this show we’ll cover
- The differences between each of these four campaign types.
- When to use them, what to expect from them in terms of results, and what the investments need to be to see results.
- Certain types of companies might fair better with specific types of campaigns, we’ll dig into that too.
- We’ll look at the data and privacy considerations for all four types of campaigns. You just can’t ignore these anymore.
- We’ll look at the metrics to track and the results you should expect.
- How much alignment with sales is required for each different type of campaign?
EOS, the entrepreneurial operating system is used by over 150,000 companies worldwide. Business planning frameworks are even more popular. But EOS and the other planning frameworks only go so far in marketing, sales, and customer service. Most companies have systems for hiring, firing, purchasing, finance, and operations but when it comes to revenue it’s a lot of winging it. No wonder so many companies fail to hit their revenue goals month over month. What’s missing is a Revenue Generation System, like RGS, but it's important to see where systems like EOS stop and where RGS starts and how these two systems work perfectly together to help companies grow faster.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What’s EOS and what is RGS.
- How companies implement EOS and RGS, there are some differences
- What kinds of companies are right for EOS and what kinds of companies are right for RGS
- What should you expect from EOS and what should you expect from RGS
- The investment for EOS and the investment for RGS
If you’re ready to make your first senior marketing hire, this can be an exciting time for your company. Finally, you’ll bring in someone with some expertise in this very important area. This makes sense, but not all marketing people are created equally. Some are solid with tactics. Others are more comfortable with strategy and today, there are marketing people whose main focus is technology. Before you pull the trigger make sure you know exactly what you’re looking for and exactly what you want them to do. For example, if you’re running RGS, then you don’t want them to come in and blow everything up, but you’ll want them to come in and slide into the resources part of the system to support how you execute your marketing tactics and campaigns. This can be a major milestone and you want it to go smoothly.
In this show we’ll cover
- What to look for in this first hire?
- How to set expectations upfront?
- What you should be planning on paying for them?
- What tools they should be asking your for
- Most importantly how to talk to them about your RGS system and their role in helping you execute your system.
Every company has challenges with it comes to revenue. Some companies need more leads. Others have too many leads and not enough sales opportunities. Believe it or not, some companies have a ton of sales opportunities but can’t convert them into new customers. Still, others might have a retention issue and are losing more customers than they can sign. Today, the process of generating revenue is more complex than it’s ever been before and you need a system or process for dealing with all the revenue-related challenges. RGS and it's IDS methodology that is part of every single Revenue Team Meeting helps you work through these challenges and solves them in every meeting. Imagine what it would be like to make 52 upgrades to your revenue effort every single week. RGS delivers that and more.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What is IDS and why is it so effective
- How does IDS become part of a regular revenue team meeting every single week
- Who manages the IDS process
- What are some tricks to make this process highly efficient and even enjoyable for everyone participating
- What are some examples of revenue-related issues that get solved in the IDS section of a regular Revenue Team Meeting
EOS, the Entrepreneurial Operation System is used by over 150,000 businesses worldwide and it's quickly becoming the go-to system for companies who want to increase traction and scale. But EOS goes very lightly over the revenue generation part of what’s required today and RGS, Square 2’s revenue generation system is specifically designed to plug into EOS to fill in this missing piece. Today’s show features an interview with EOS Implementer Monica Justice. We’ll ask Monica about EOS and her experience helping her clients gain traction. We’ll also discuss the idea of a revenue plug-in like RGS for EOS clients and go deep into how RGS works with EOS.
In this show, we’ll cover
- An explanation of EOS and how companies use it
- Why revenue generation needs its own system, like RGS
- How do RGS and EOS work together, what is the shared vocabulary and rhythm
- Why EOS companies are a good fit for RGS
- Some experience sharing around what companies are typically dealing with when they chose to use EOS and RGS
A revenue generation system isn’t just about new leads, new sales opportunities, and new customers. It’s about finding revenue wherever it is available and in most companies that includes the current customer base. However, in many businesses, these opportunities are overlooked or under-prioritized. But when you apply a systems approach to revenue you include customer service in the conversation, you build tactics to keep communication and opportunity development going with current customers and you actively market cross-sell, up-sell and ongoing services to the people who already like working with you and your teams. Once installed you can improve retention and drive a significant amount of revenue to help you hit your goals more consistently.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How to include customer service in weekly revenue team meetings
- How to build programs that help you gain a larger share of wallet from current customers
- How to project revenue from current customers
- How to get your customer service reps to start looking for revenue opportunities
- How to arm them with the tools they need to create a great experience for your customers while continuing to look for new revenue opportunities.
Revenue is a team game. New customers are rarely closed by a single individual these days. Prospects are looking for an experience that makes them feel special, valued, and important. Not to mention that they want to get to know, like, and trust you. So having a single salesperson carry the ball from beginning to end is a bit old-school. So, when we started recommending weekly sales opportunity reviews as part of the weekly Revenue Team Meeting we had a tremendous response. Today, brainstorming ways to get deals over the finish line provides a consistent way to focus your team on closing deals and closing them faster. In addition, these conversations should be focused NOT only on new customer revenue but also on current customer revenue. They should be geared around your sales process and making that remarkable. Adding this section to your weekly Revenue Team Meeting will help you grow revenue much more consistently.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How to lead a revenue review conversation?
- Who leads this section of the meeting?
- Who attends this section of the meeting?
- What are the goals of having a session like this?
- How detailed do you go and how many opportunities should you review?
Marketing, sales and customer service should be working towards very specific metrics. Setting up a scorecard that provides the KPIs that are critical to your success needs to be something that’s part of every revenue generation system. The rhythms of review associated with these numbers are equally important. Do you look at numbers weekly, monthly, or quarterly? Everyone on your revenue team should have a metric that they are working on, accountable for, and responsible for delivering. This is how you get 100% alignment around the most important metrics and drive “up and to the right” for all your most important revenue metrics.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What numbers you should consider?
- Who should be accountable for what numbers?
- Should those be weekly, monthly, or quarterly numbers?
- How to set goals for these metrics?
- What tools to use to get data that everyone agrees is accurate?
When it comes to strategy and creating your Big Story, campaign messaging, content strategy, website plans, and even your technology plans leaking out pieces of this over a few months can feel painfully slow and in some cases, it can be hard to feel like these are all connected and orchestrated. But immersive boot camps and a series of workshops can help you make better progress faster and work on the connected components over a period of hours instead of weeks. This can help accelerate this process and can contribute to improved results.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What workshops to consider?
- How to organize these into Bootcamps?
- Who should attend these Bootcamps?
- Who should run the Bootcamps?
- What are the outcomes and deliverables from these Bootcamps?
It’s the $1 million dollar question. When? When will we see results? It’s the question everyone wants to know but the answer is elusive and it's elusive for very good reasons. First, how hard are you going to work? How much are you willing to invest? How many changes are you planning to apply? How good are you at taking advice and guidance? How good is your story? How rich is your content? How helpful is your website? There are a ton of qualitative answers as well as a number of quantitative answers that go into answering this very important question. In this episode, we’ll go in-depth on this question, we’ll try to answer it, and give all our audience members the insight required to answer it on their own, for their company, their product/service, and their own revenue generation efforts.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How to mitigate risks that might delay expected results
- How to ensure you get results faster than most
- How to estimate how long it's actually going to take, to the best of our ability
- How to align investment with the timing of expected results
- Some of the unknowns that always impact timing around results
Not everyone is right for a revenue generation system like the one we’ve been talking about for the last few months. Some companies don’t need it, they’re hitting their goals month after month. Others might need it but might not be ready to stick with it, follow it and practice enough to get good at using it. Like anything new, it's going to take practice and an investment of time, money, and resources. But mostly it's going to take a commitment to do revenue differently and working hard to learn the new motions associated with a different approach. During the show today we’ll profile what types of companies are solid candidates for a revenue generation system and we’ll also look at the profile for leaders that have what it takes to champion an initiative like adding a revenue generation system to your existing business.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What types of companies are ready for a revenue generation system?
- What is the leadership profile for companies that will get the best results out of using a system like this?
- If a company needs a revenue generation system but they don’t fit the current success profile, what should it do to get in better shape?
- How can companies self-analyze their past perspectives and behaviors to know for sure if this kind of approach is right for them?
- What are some of the mistakes companies make that prevent them from getting full value from a program like this?
Every week I ask a handful of folks if they have a budget for their marketing initiatives and 90% of the time the answer is no. No budget and no idea of what should be budgeted to help with revenue-generation activities. This is a major challenge and one that should be relatively easy to fix. In this episode, we talk extensively about how having a revenue generation system helps create an appropriate budget based on goals, how to manage that budget, and how to ensure you get full value for the money invested into revenue generation.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How a system like RGS helps you align your budget with goals and expectations
- How to use a system to manage your budget
- How to use a system to prevent you from going over budget
- How to focus your investment on the most important activities, priorities, and metrics
- How to use the system to continuously update, adjust and your investment expectations.
- How a Revenue Cycle Model helps set expectations and alignment around budget
The idea of systems for your business isn’t new. In fact, most of the areas of your company already have systems for them. Areas like HR, operations, finance, and purchasing have been around for decades. Other systems are also prevalent today. Systems that help CEOs and owners better manage their companies at a high level. These systems include EOS, Gazelles, and other operating systems but tend to provide only a light touch regarding revenue generation. However, these systems do teach you a lot of parallel concepts to what RGS teaches about revenue and RGS is a beautiful compliment for many of the business operating systems that exist today.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How RGS works with a system like EOS
- Why EOS companies understand RGS and how it benefits you to have both
- What are the similarities and differences between RGS and EOS
- Our experiences when companies have EOS experience and when they don’t
- What you should expect if you’re already using EOS and start using RGS
Learning anything new often requires working with an expert. When you want to get better at golf, you take lessons with a pro. There are a lot of parallels to learning a new revenue generation system to help your company grow. While you can learn the system and use the tools on your own if you want to see results faster if you want to make learning it easier or even if you just want some help from an outside expert, using a coach is the best option and will deliver better results.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What role an RGS Coach plays in helping you learn the system
- How an RGS Coach works with you and your team
- The difference between self-implementing and working with a coach
- What experiences, skills, and backgrounds does an RGS Coach bring to the process
- What impact can a coach make when it comes to results
No matter what we show you, teach you, or share with you about a revenue generation system, you’re ultimately going to have to do the work on your own to plan, build and then execute your own system. This means the resources you have access to become everything. In fact, if you don’t have the right people, the right expertise, enough capacity, and the right budgetary expectations I think it's going to be challenging to get your own revenue generation system up and running.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How to decide exactly what resources you’ll need for your particular revenue generation system
- How to manage those resources
- How to evaluate those resources
- How to budget properly for the right number of resources based on your goals
- How to support your existing resources with outside resources as needed
To create month-over-month revenue growth, you’ll need to juggle a chain saw, bowling ball, and a feature; all while eating a tuna sandwich. There is just so much to do and too few hands to do it. Personalize campaigns, ongoing optimization based on data, automated email follow-ups, lead scoring, and more. The list of support required today is endless and there is no way to build a revenue generation system without technology, tools, and a database to support you and your entire revenue team.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What technology looks like when it comes to marketing and why point solutions no longer fit the bill.
- Why your CRM and your sales technology are the most important technology in your entire company.
- Why your website shouldn’t be on WordPress anymore
- How to use customer service technology to identify new revenue opportunities and systematize that effort
- Why you need data to make every single revenue-related decision and how to get that data
Just rolling out tactics are not going to get you to your revenue goals. Instead, you need a set of highly orchestrated, personalized, and cross-channel campaigns that support the marketing, sales, and customer part of your business. Marketing campaigns that bring new people into your orbit. Sales campaigns that move people through your sales process and customer campaigns that encourage current customers to buy more, more often, new stuff from your company. These campaigns need to be one-to-one, orchestrated across channels, and highly personalized if you want to create the revenue generation system we’ve been talking about all year.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How to create a cross-channel orchestrated campaign
- What personalization means to campaign design
- How to select the right channels
- How to use your Big Story and campaign messaging to tie everything together
- How to measure campaign success and how to optimize your campaigns over time
When it comes to month-over-month revenue generation it all starts with leads. The tactics you need to generate leads today are almost unlimited. There are hundreds of options from email marketing to organic search, paid social ads, video, your website, and more. How do you know which ones to use, when to use them, and which ones are a miss for your company, product, service, or industry? In this episode, we’ll go deep into all the tactics at your disposal and help uncover a process for deciding which ones to use, how to test them, how to measure them, and how to continue adding new tactics to your portfolio to ensure new leads consistently flow in and down to the sales team.
In this show, we’ll cover
- How to create a comprehensive list of potential marketing, sales, and revenue generation tactics to consider.
- How to prioritize the tactics down into a manageable list.
- How to know which ones you have the expertise and skills to execute successfully.
- How to plan, measure and optimize tactics over time.
- How to evaluate the tactics and then decide to stop, continue, or double down on a tactic based on performance.
You’d never build a house without plans. You’d never attempt to beat cancer without a plan and you’d never go to war without a plan but day in and day out people try to generate revenue without any real plan or strategy. In this episode, we’ll unlock the secret to creating a revenue generation strategy that has been proven successful year over year for 20 years. Personas, your big story, differentiation, budget setting, KPIs, resource planning and more go into creating a strategy that produces results and we’ll talk about it all during this episode of the show. It’s one of the “can’t miss” episodes of the year.
In this show, we’ll cover
- Why your personas are likely incomplete and how to fix them
- What your Big Story should be and how to create it, it's easier than you think
- How to differentiate your business and why it’s not differentiated right now
- What does it mean to be remarkable
- Why mapping your prospect’s buyer journey is not a nice to have, but a must-have
- How to create a budget and KPIs that are aligned with your strategy
One of the keys to a revenue generation system is getting good with the process, applying a process, and sticking religiously to a process. There are weekly, monthly and quarterly processes associated with a revenue generation system and we’ll look into all three of the processes needed to drive revenue. Specifically, we’ll unpack what’s part of weekly Revenue Team Meetings with a Scorecard, To-Dos, Rocks, and the ability to process issues quickly and efficiently. We’ll share with you how to run a 30-Day Sprint Planning meeting every month and how to plan a slightly longer-term 90-Day Strategy Review every quarter. These come together to create a rhythm that empowers your team to execute a revenue generation system that produces results and gets optimized every week.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What does a weekly revenue team meeting look like
- What does a revenue team scorecard look like and how to create one
- How to process issues and drive to-dos every single week
- Who runs the weekly revenue team meeting
- What do you do during a 30-day sprint planning meeting
- What do you do during a 90-day strategy session
There are six areas that need your direct attention if you’re planning on using a revenue generation system in 2023. There are four specific pillars. Strategy, tactics, campaigns, and technology. Then there are two supporting elements, process, and resources. You need all six to be working in conjunction to hit your goals. In this episode we’ll look at all six of these important pieces and then in upcoming episodes we’ll go deep into each of them, so you understand in detail how each work together.
In this show, we’ll cover
- Why you need these six elements to drive revenue growth
- How each of these different elements works together to help you create your system
- Why if even one of these is missing your system breaks down
- What’s the best way to keep these six elements orchestrated over the course of the year
- How to get organized around these six elements to get your system off the ground
If you’re like most companies, you’ve seen sporadic revenue growth. Some months you hit your goals, others you don’t. We estimate that only 10% of companies are able to hit their revenue goals month over month and sustain it for the entire year. This year is going to be different and we’re going to help by sharing what you need to install a revenue-generation system in your business. In the first episode of WWWR in 2023 we’re going to lay out the thinking behind a systems approach to revenue, why it works, why you need it if you want to grow, and what you need to start thinking about to get a system installed for 2023.
In this show, we’ll cover
- What is a revenue generation system?
- Why most companies don’t have a system for revenue when they have systems for so many other areas of the business?
- How to know if a revenue generation system is right for your company?
- What’s involved in getting a revenue generation system set up?
- What to expect from the system and when?
When it comes to business growth and revenue generation, people will look back at 2022 and likely refer to it as the year everything changed. So much has changed over the past 12 months, and it's worth looking back at how privacy, regulation, tools, technology, and the economy has impacted all our efforts to generate revenue and grow our companies. Today, the options available to CEOs when it comes to working on creating a scalable, repeatable revenue generation system are numerous, yet companies still struggle to grow. There is a disconnect there that we’ll help uncover. We’ll also take a look forward toward 2023 and as you’re doing planning today for next year, we’ll talk about a few important considerations for your 2023 revenue plans.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How the economy impacted revenue generation in 2022.
- How the digital marketing playbook is changing; what happened in 2022 to accelerate this change?
- How technology is impacting how you should be thinking about revenue; in some cases, is making it easier, in other cases more complex.
- What’s going on with data? First party, and third party data, and how to think about both types.
- What to look forward to in 2023, how to plan for 2023, and what new ideas should be on your radar?
- What to expect from What’s Wrong With Revenue? in 2023?
Many of the companies we meet have their website on WordPress but today the world has changed and while this might have been a solid website strategy a few years ago today there are much better options that in the end are equally affordable as WordPress. The bigger question here for you should be how you get your website secure, easy to use, and produce leads, sales opportunities, and new business. One of the best alternatives is HubSpot. Their CMS has grown so dramatically over the past few years and today has some amazing features.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- Why you need to control your website and be able to optimize it, edit it, and work on it easily every single week.
- We’ll dig into why a WordPress website isn’t free when it appears the platform is an open-source and free product.
- We’ll talk about the new and emerging security risks to your WordPress website and what to do about it.
- We’ll dig into HubSpot’s CMS and share some of the new and dynamic features coming out in the near future that will make you want to consider moving it.
- We’ll also talk about what’s typically required when you move a site from one CMS platform to a new one.
It’s not easy to predict what might happen. This is especially true when we talk about revenue. It’s hard to know, even with the best plan, what to expect in terms of results and business outcomes. It’s also challenging where to look for results. Is it visitors, leads, sales opportunities, or new customers? What about when your sales cycle is six months long? How does that impact how you measure results against expectations? It’s critical that you set expectations correctly and timing is a big part of that process. There are definitely ways to know when revenue programs are working even when actual revenue has yet to be realized.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What timing is reasonable for what metrics
- How to transition over time from early expected outcomes and metrics to middle and more mature expected outcomes and metrics
- How patient do you need to be waiting for the big results like new customers and new revenue
- What are the variables that make programs produce more quickly or more slowly and how should you think about which one of these scenarios is right for your company
- What to consider if your program is consistently underperforming
You would never run your business without a budget so you shouldn’t run revenue without one either. You need to set your level of investment based on your growth goals and the plans you have for attaining those goals. What conferences, what website upgrades, what technology, what paid social, paid search, content creating and more needs to get done to produce a certain level of performance. All those questions need to be asked and answered now during your planning cycles for 2023. You should never have to answer the question, “what is your budget for this project?” with “we don’t have one or I don’t know.” You MUST have one and you should manage to it. We’ll help you get this done for 2023 during the show.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to back into the budget number based on your actual growth goals
- How to attribute budget to specific programs so you can build your budget number
- Ways to evaluate the return on your investment during the year so next year’s budget setting process should be much easier
- How to look at the budget across marketing, sales, and customer service as it relates to revenue growth and spending in each area
- What to do if you’ve underestimated or overestimated mid-year
Creating a plan for revenue growth is an important task for most companies. Yet this generally gets left to the marketing team to come up with a plan of attack. The sales team generally plans for number of salespeople as does the customer service team. There is no integrated, orchestrated revenue plan created at most of the companies we’ve worked with over the past 20 years. Instead, we’re talking about identifying company growth goals and then reverse engineering a plan that backs into exactly what’s needed across all three areas to deliver on those growth goals. Including marketing expenditures, sales upgrades, customer service upgrades, and looking at the flow-through of net new contacts introduced to the company all the way to new customers acquired and the average revenue for each new customer. It’s the only way to ensure you are aligned around goals and execution before the year starts.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- A specific methodology for backing into metrics based on growth goals
- Setting realistic growth goals based on past performance and expected investment levels
- Building out a revenue generation plan that aligns with goals and investment
- Keeping that plan agile to quickly make midyear adjustments based on data
- Installing methodology to make sure that the execution is efficient and matches your plan
Systems are everywhere in business. Some of the best-run businesses lean heavily on systems and processes to help them scale and grow. Revenue is no different, but hardly any companies look at revenue and think systems. However, if you want to grow your business and scale it up quickly, systems are exactly what you should be looking for. Systems for marketing, systems for sales, and systems for customer service. Better yet, a system for the entire revenue generation effort is going to put your company in the best possible position to drive month-over-month, repeatable, scalable, and predictable revenue growth.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What a revenue generation system looks like
- What’s required to build one for your business
- Who in the company would need to be part of that process
- The long-term value of having a revenue generation system
- The pluses and minuses of doing this yourself or using an existing system
The world might have changed right in front of your eyes. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, and not to mention the explosion of audio content like podcasts. This might seem like an issue for B2C brands or people who market to teenagers but it's not. Audio and video content is here to stay, and it needs to be a major part of your marketing and sales strategy. The people you’re trying to attract to your business are consuming massive amounts of video and audio content along their buyer journey. In fact, data shows they prefer printed or written content. Now it’s time to start including more audio and video content in your marketing, sales, and customer service execution. In today’s show, we’ll talk about exactly how to do that.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to know what video and audio content you might need in your revenue generation efforts
- What creative ideas you could consider when creating this type of content and differentiate your business
- Why it's easier than ever to shoot, edit, and produce this type of content
- The marketing applications might be more obvious, but sales and customer service need similar types of content
- How to leverage thought leadership and market position in this type of content
- Where and how to deploy the audio and video content after its produced
Trade shows, conferences, and events are back and back big. But do you know how to optimize your participation in these events? It’s very likely that you’re showing up but wasting a lot of potential opportunities to generate leads, move sales opportunities along and close new customer business. We’ll discuss a variety of event-related tactics that will definitely improve your ROI on the large event investment associated with most conferences and trade shows. There are a number of tricks and techniques that help you attract the right people and repel the wrong people. We’ll also cover how to optimize the follow-up, so no lead gets left behind.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to create an event plan before you leave for the event and then how to make sure you execute that plan during the event
- Why less, but more qualified leads, are better than a ton of business card non-leads
- How to use your marketing automation platform to automate everything associated with nurturing leads from your events
- Why speaking at events MUST be part of your event strategy
- What in-show promotions work the best to generate real sales opportunities
Your sales process is everything. If you’re a B2B company selling large ticket products or services, if you have a long sales cycle, and if your sale is complex, then you need a killer sales process. It can make or break your company. The experience your prospects have with you and your sales team during your sales process is going to create emotions, relationships, and memories that will influence and, in some cases, even dictate whether you win or lose the deal.
In this episode, we’ll cover the following –
- How to use the prospect’s buyer journey to create a remarkable sales process
- How content plays a major role in creating this remarkable sales process
- How technology is mandatory to ensure everyone is taking the same actions at the same time during the process
- How to track and measure the success of your sales process
- How to continually improve your sales process based on data and feedback
At Square 2, we’ve always been very transparent with what we’re doing and why. We’re happy to share our wins and our losses. Today, content looks nothing like what it looked like even two or three years ago.
The show is a great example. We used to blog every single day, but when blogging stopped being as effective and audio and video content started to take off, we pivoted and started running LIVECast, video, and podcast shows.
This is our third iteration of audio and video content creation. Today, we’ll go behind the scenes at Square 2 and talk about what went into creating the show, how it evolved from the other three shows, and what we’re looking forward to over the next 12 months.
During the show, we’ll cover –
- Why a show like this produce content in a format that people want to consume
- The scalability of the show and what goes into it
- What we’re planning for this type of content going forward
- The future of content, communities, and producing thought leadership content that drives the important key metrics
- How to come up with your own content programming
Join Mike and Channel Account Manager Nathan Singer from HubSpot in a post-Inbound 22 debrief. Our interview digs deep into the new HubSpot features released at Inbound 22. We talk about the changing landscape associated with growth and growing companies. The conversation with Nathan is enlightening, exciting, and very educational. This episode caps our Inbound 22 coverage.
Join Mike and Eric at Inbound 22 where we chat with Guillaume Delloue, Channel Account Manager at HubSpot. Our interview digs deep into the new HubSpot features released at Inbound 22. We talk about the changing landscape associated with growth and growing companies. The conversation with Guillaume is enlightening, exciting, and very educational. Filmed live on the Inbound 22 floor, this episode is a special one.
One of the best ways to generate leads quickly is to work with partners. However, this tactic brings its own share of challenges. First, you need to find non-competitive companies that either have your perfect customer as clients or who are marketing to the same audience as your company. Next, you need to make sure they can support any joint marketing campaigns and effectively execute the joint marketing campaigns as well as you do. But once you find the right partners, regular joint marketing activities can be very effective
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to select potential partners to do joint marketing with
- What types of joint marketing tactics should be considered and why?
- What to expect when you work with partners on marketing initiatives
- How to equip your partners with marketing materials to ensure your program is successful
- Some examples of successful partner marketing initiatives
Account-based marketing is one of the hottest tactics being discussed today. But we still see companies who don’t understand it, don’t know how to deploy it, don’t know how to measure it, and think it’s a quick solution to a lack of sales opportunities. Instead, executing ABM correctly means you need a very clear set of target companies, an excellent database with current and accurate contact information, highly personalized and targeted content, social media messages, and a tight alignment between sales and marketing. Even with that, you should expect this to be a long-term tactic that might take 30 to 60 days before you start seeing any type of return.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to go about creating a list of top tier targets, second tier targets, and even a tertiary tier of target accounts
- How the ABM campaign execution is different at each level
- Why you need personal campaign content targeted to the individual contacts
- Why social media outreach is mandatory to get new contacts to be engaged with your content
- Don’t try ABM without tight alignment between sales and marketing
Today, people making B2B, complex purchase decisions around high ticket averages execute a buyer journey that is long, highly influenced, multi-stage and non-linear. That’s why we created the Cyclonic Buyer Journey to help companies understand each of the stages in today’s buyer journey. To support this new, highly complex, highly influenced buyer journey, your content needs to be perfectly aligned with your prospect’s buyer journey. At each stage of the journey, you need to know what questions prospects are asking, what issues they have, what education they need, and what exactly it takes to get them to feel safe selecting your company over all the other options.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to understand the new Cyclonic Buyer Journey
- How to craft content and strategically design that content to deliver a remarkable experience
- How to leverage content in marketing, sales, and customer service so that it drives new revenue
- What types of content are getting the best results today?
- How to deploy different types of content at different stages of the buyer journey?
For most companies, more is always better. More campaigns, more calls, more emails, more social ads, more remarketing, search ads, and more calls to action. But our research shows that it's almost always better to do less targeted and highly optimized campaigns than simply doing more for the sake of doing more. This means your Marketing Operations team isn’t following an optimization framework to make your current ads and your current campaigns work better. This concept of cycling is very important. The more and the faster you cycle, the more optimization you get in and the faster your campaigns get to their optimized performance. You need this optimization phase to get campaigns dialed in.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What skill sets are needed for your marketing operations team
- When to outsource to an agency vs. handling it inhouse
- What tools are needed for faster cycling and better optimization
- Who should be responsible for these ongoing optimizations?
- How frequently does cycling need to take place to drive program optimization?
Almost every company has reports and most companies have dashboards or scorecards they use to keep track of their performance in the areas of marketing, sales, and customer service. Some companies even have detailed dashboards for more specific operational performance tracking but did you know that reports, dashboards, and scorecards will only get you 50% of the way there. More important to this analytical picture is the ability to pull out insights from this data and use these insights to inform your action plan. Today very few companies are able to uncover insights buried in their data so their marketing, sales, and customer service execution doesn’t improve fast enough and, in most cases, doesn’t improve at all.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- Whose responsibility it is to review the data and uncover these insights
- What skill sets and experience are necessary to uncover these insights
- What you should be doing with these insights after they’ve been uncovered
- How often should this process of data analysis and insight discovery be run at your company?
- What tools and technology are necessary to make this process manageable?
Very few agencies or in-house teams spend much time creating a campaign methodology or creating a campaign team to drive campaign results. But Square 2 does, so we know how to generate results with our campaign execution. You need a very specific methodology and framework but more importantly, you need a set of people who have deep and expansive experience planning, building, running, analyzing, and optimizing ongoing campaigns for success. People also have the wrong timing around expectations for campaign results. It’s 30 days, but the performance data shifts month over month as the campaign optimization focus also changes from early indicators like visitors to leads and conversions. Knowing how to plan out ongoing campaign execution that spans months is key.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to teach your team campaign methodology
- We’ll show you the Square 2 Campaign Methodology
- What results to expect during each stage of the campaign
- What investment levels are commensurate with expectations
- What optimization cycles are and how to use them to generate better results
Most people blame sales for slow or no revenue growth. Other people blame marketing for not being able to generate enough leads for sales but it's rarely one department's problem when growth slows when we look at a company's “go-to-market” it's almost always more strategic an issue than first thought. Most companies are missing an emotional, compelling and differentiated story. They might not be going after the right target or not positioning their product/service correctly. Usually, they’re missing the right educational materials to help prospects feel safe and almost always have very little understanding of their own prospect’s buyer journey. These are all foundational pieces for growth to be realized and they’re missing from most companies.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What are all the foundational elements necessary for growth
- How to know if your company has these in good working order or not
- What to do if you notice some of these elements might be missing
- What the impact will be when you add these missing elements
- What skillsets and experiences are necessary to add these to your company if they are, in fact, missing?
Most people purchase a CRM for the sales team, marketing automation for their marketing department and service software for the customer service team. Instead consider looking for a revenue generation platform that comes with all three pieces already integrated out of the box. Consider looking for a platform that is designed to help your company grow revenue instead of solving a specific departmental challenge. This new perspective is going to change the way you look at your company and the technology that supports it.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to make sure you realize your growth goals after purchasing software designed to help you grow.
- How to get cross departmental buy-in on a different approach to your tech stack.
- Specifically, how marketing, sales and customer service need to work together on a single platform.
- What options you have for platforms like we’re describing during the show.
- What challenges typically present when companies are making this change
You built your new website a little over a year ago. Who would ever consider that it might need a refresh, upgrade or major overhaul already? But it does need one. With all the changes Google has made to its search algorithm, with all the new tools available for website management and with the new learnings around visitor experience even websites that are a few months old—are undergoing major updates. Page load speed, conversion optimization, interactive elements and performance on mobile are likely impacting your site's ability to rank, be visible to prospects and turn prospects into leads. You should be working on your website every single month, not every few years. In this episode, we’ll break down what’s driving these changes and how you need to respond to them.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to dig into your website analytics and uncover the performance impacting issues
- How to stay on top of the changes and create a Growth Driven Design approach to your site
- What might be required to fix up your current site so its optimized for today’s environment
- What level of budget should you be considering for these website upgrades?
- How to decide what resources are needed, skill sets and experiences to get the best results.
Many companies don’t recognize their own databases as important corporate assets. But they are. Your customer database but also your prospect database are critical to your success and if these databases are clean, accurate, regularly maintained and properly segmented you are going to get better results from all your investments in marketing than if they are a hot mess. Unfortunately, many companies have bad data, inaccurate data, old data, old lists, purchased lists, little or no segmentation and incomplete records. This is turning one of your most important assets into an unusable component that should be supporting marketing, sales and fueling revenue growth. In this show, we’ll coach you on how to fix your database but more importantly, prevent it from ever getting in poor condition like this.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to evaluate your current database and assess its actual condition
- How to put someone in charge of keeping your database clean and accurate
- How to go about cleaning it up if it is a mess
- How to monitor it to make sure if there are issues, they are caught early and corrected
- Why everyone in the company must know the company’s goals and how they’re work contributes to those goals
Today, the experience you create for your prospects and clients for that matter is everything. People are judging you based on that experience. They are deciding whether to hire you or not based on that experience and they’re deciding whether to refer you or not based on that experience too. If your growth is challenged, there is a very good correlation to a mediocre or even poor experience before, during, and after prospects work with sales. This means they’re not having a good experience on your website or with your educational content. Sales are giving them an average, at the best experience and after they become a customer, well the mediocrity continues. This is a fast track to a mediocre business and flat or downward growth. In this show, we’ll show you how exactly to ramp up that experience so it’s remarkable.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to map out your prospect and customer buyer journey
- How to identify ALL the touch points starting with marketing and running through sales and customer service
- How to upgrade even the smallest touchpoints with little WOWs that create an experience people talk about
- How this leads to better lead gen, more sales opportunities, many more referrals, and repeat business
- Why this needs to be thought through and connected to overall marketing strategy upfront.
This might seem self-serving, but it’s not. Square 2 uses a number of outside experts to help us with finance, legal, acquisitions, and even some content production that is outside our wheelhouse. Why do companies lean into expert advice for legal and finance but resist the same move when it comes to marketing, sales, technology, or strategic support. If you’re not growing you might need to rethink who you bring in from the outside to help you grow. Growth expertise can come from a variety of places and in this show, we’ll unpack as many of those options as possible.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to know what outside advice you need to help you grow
- How to assess whether you need a sole practitioner from your industry or an agency with a wide variety of industry expertise
- How to know what outside expertise costs and how much to invest in it
- How to work with outside experts, there are actually a number of models that all work well
- How long do you work with experts, shouldn’t this expertise eventually be brought in-house? Not always.
When you go to a cocktail party and you meet someone new, but all they do is talk about themselves, how do you feel? Exactly! That’s what you’re doing when your marketing and sales communications are all about you. Everything you do in marketing and sales should be about your prospects, not about you. Your website should be about how you help people. Your sales stories should be about what you did for other people and how you can do the same thing for every prospect. While you have to mention your name sometimes, your copy should be 80% about your prospects and just 20% about you. Take a look at your website, how many times do you use the words we, us, our, or your company name? How many times do you use the words you and your? It’s a great way to see far off your own marketing might be. Don’t be that guy at the party.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- We’ll talk about why this is so important
- We’ll cover some techniques that you can use to make sure this doesn’t happen or fix it quickly
- This comes up in more places than you think, we’ll uncover all the places this needs your attention
- We’ll talk about applying this in marketing and sales material
- How changing this impacts results
The 12-month marketing plan should be dead and buried. The last time we did a plan like this was in 2015. Planning for more than two or three months out is a waste of time. Instead, consider learning how to run your revenue generation efforts with the Agile Methodology. This requires a very specific set of rituals and practices but takes its cue from the software development space where client feedback and data dictate future versions. In this case, data would dictate short and mid-term planning so that you’re always responding and taking action based on actual performance and not opinions. This is going to produce a significant lift in terms of results, but it takes a lot of practice and discipline.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- Being agile does not mean being flexible, using Agile is a very specific set of processes and we’ll go into them during the show
- We’ll cover the rhythms associated with running an Agile revenue generation effort
- We’ll cover the rituals that make Agile work for marketing and sales
- We’ll talk about the roles you need and the timing around moving to an Agile approach
- We’ll cover the improvement in results you should expect from using this methodology
Over the years, the ideas of campaigns come up very frequently with prospects and clients. Everyone wants to do them. Hardly anyone knows how to design them. A set of paid ads on Instagram is a campaign, but it’s not a multi-channel or omnichannel campaign. Understanding what we mean by campaigns is important. You can send a single email out and consider it a campaign. However, this isn’t going to produce significant results. Campaigns need to be designed to carry a similar message or story across multiple vehicles like your website, email, paid, influencers, partners, search, social, and others. When you have all of these vehicles working together with the same story, offers, and creative—that’s an omnichannel campaign. We’ll talk about this in detail during the show.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to create campaign messaging that connects to your overall company positioning
- How to select and execute using multiple tactics or channels
- How to connect the different channel offers and or creative to create a consistent campaign
- How to track the success of the campaign
- How long to run the campaign, this is big, we see people running them too long or too short.
It's irrefutable, people don’t want to be sold to. We all have created defense mechanisms to repel salespeople. These mechanisms are ingrained into our reptilian brain. The same system that controls fight or flight, pushes salespeople away. “I’m just browsing,” is the most common mechanism, but many of us get physically ill when we think we’re being sold to. Yet, so many companies still run sales processes and hire sales reps to convince people to buy, to use pressure tactics, and push people to take action.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to help your reps understand the difference between convincing and guiding
- What it means to be a Sales Guide
- What does a Guided Sales Process look like?
- How to better understand what it means to help prospects “feel safe.”
- How to use supporting tools and content to create a remarkable sales experience
A lot of companies have seen organic visitors declining over the past six months. This means fewer people are finding your site when they search and this also means fewer leads from people searching for products and services like yours. But why? What’s causing this? Frankly, there are a lot of reasons for declining organic visitors. Google regularly changes its algorithms and you have to keep up. Your website degrades over time producing a less than stellar experience and Google notices it. If you haven’t created a website that’s designed for your visitors, your site isn’t signaling to Google its true value. Bottom line, there is a lot that can be wrong with your site and your technical SEO efforts. We’ll break this all down and talk about how you can fix it.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to know how your site is doing from a technical SEO perspective
- How to prioritize fixes to make improvements quickly
- How to keep tabs on your site, over time, so you have fewer issues less frequently
- How to stay up to date on the changes Google is making
- How to keep your visitors in mind when you make changes or addition to your current site.
Change is hard and big change is even harder. But if you’re not hitting your revenue goals, it might be time to blow up everything you’re doing and try an entirely new set of tactics. The world is changing and it's already changed dramatically, it's very possible that what got you to your current revenue levels won’t get you to your new revenue levels. Digital transformation is remaking businesses in every industry. If you’re still using old-school tactics for marketing and sales, regardless of how they used to work or how comfortable you are with them, it might be time to rethink the entire effort. Sometimes, ripping off the band-aid is exactly the right solution.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to evaluate if big change is needed
- Where to look and what options are available if you want to rethink your entire go to market
- Examples of other companies who took the big step
- What’s involved and how long it might take to execute an entire digital transformation effort
- Who needs to lead this and what outside resources might make this easier?
Today’s marketing and sales execution have everything to do with whether you hit your revenue goals or not. But businesses still put people in the wrong roles, for the wrong reasons. From a marketing perspective, this happens all the time. People are put into marketing because no one else wants to do it or no one else has the expertise. How many people have marketing people who also handle admin for the company? That can’t be in 2022. You need professional marketers, technical marketers, and strategic marketers to drive revenue. This happens in sales too. Almost every sales organization has poor performers at the bottom of the rankings. Eighty percent of new sales still come from 20% of the reps. You need professional sales guides, people who understand the new buyer behavior, and people who are willing to work differently with prospects. If you don’t have the right people in the right roles, you won’t hit your revenue goals
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to get the right people in the right roles
- How to evaluate your current people and make difficult decisions
- How to use “scaffolding” to support your company until you get the right people in the right roles
- Hiring “in house” vs. using outside agencies to support your lack of expertise
- Helping people grow professionally so they can move into new roles
For years, there has been a battle, demand generation vs. inbound marketing. One is to get your name out there, generate awareness and let the people come back when they’re ready and the other is earning attention for your business so you’re there when people start looking. Both are solid marketing approaches and both can live together in your company’s marketing strategy. But demand generation has an entirely different set of metrics and expectations. Inbound has its own set of metrics and expectations. One is more reactive, the other proactive. We’ll cover both and discuss how to figure out which is right for you. Maybe they both need a place in your approach to growth.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What is demand generation? What specific tactics fall into this methodology?
- What is inbound marketing? What specific tactics fall into this methodology?
- When to use them? When not to use them?
- How to understand expectations around performance for both?
- Why has inbound gone through a downturn over the last five years?
Most companies leave the high-level goal setting to the CEO or leadership team. In most cases, those are driven by outside sources like investors, boards, or ego. We did $20M last year, we should definitely be able to do $25 this year or our competitor did $50M, so we should be able to at least $40M. But the reality is, these goals have nothing to do with outside influences and everything to do with internal factors like budget, resources, capabilities, and people. Learn how to back into realistic and attainable goals based on actual performance and resources available. Then learn how to increase those variables in order to hit your expected goals.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to stop guessing at goals and objectives
- How to align investment to goals and objectives
- How to use real performance data to set your goals and then adjust them based on that data
- Why you should never answer the question, “what is your marketing budget?” with “I don’t know.”
- Why everyone in the company must know the company’s goals and how their work contributes to those goals
Your company is throwing marketing tactics against the wall to see what sticks. We call these, random acts of marketing, and it's never going to produce the results you expect. Instead, you need the right mix of marketing tactics, all executing in an orchestrated way to produce the one plus one equals three you’ve been promised. Today’s prospects have complex buying journey’s so that’s made the selection and execution of marketing tactics equally complex. You have to know exactly what to say, to whom, when, and in what format to impact your prospects buying journey.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to know what tactics to use and when
- How to organize all the appropriate tactics and manage them like a philharmonic orchestra
- How to prioritize tactics when your budget prevents you from doing it all
- How to get tactics to work together in an omnichannel approach
- When to say NO to certain tactics and why
You bought technology because you thought it would solve a problem. But then you learned technology alone rarely solves problems. It’s technology plus process, plus people that make the magic happen. Now you have a mess of tech on your hands. Some of it works, some of it doesn’t. Some of it could work if someone knew how to fix it, other tech will probably never work as originally designed. What do you do? How do you recover? How can you leverage what you bought without having to buy more? Who’s responsible? Who can help?
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to evaluate your current tech stack and individual products?
- Who is available to help and how do you engage them to get what you want?
- Who should be responsible, inside your company, for keeping your tech stack running smoothly?
- How to keep this from happening again
- How to wrap a system around your technology so it becomes a helpful tool to help you grow
We see this time and time again, another company with a brand that isn’t strong enough to generate the interest required to drive to your goals. You can’t go to market with a message that is similar to any of your competitors. If you don’t have anything interesting or remarkable to say, don’t bother saying anything at all. When content is king, if you can’t create thought-leading content and tell a story that is disruptive, then get ready for meager results from your marketing. It’s not marketing’s fault if your story is vanilla.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to take a position, ride it until you die, and leverage it in your content marketing strategy
- How to find your place in your market
- How to convert that position into an emotional, compelling and disruptive story
- Why this helps your marketing and sales results thrive
- What tactics to use to activate that thought leadership so it generates results
It’s not enough to have a great company, great products, or great services if your customers are not singing your praises from the mountain tops. In other words, if your customers are not telling everyone they know about you—you have more work to do. You have armed them with the tools they need to make advocacy easy. You have to incent them appropriately so they invest the extra time to become an advocate and they have to have helped them so dramatically that the idea of advocacy is theirs and not yours.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to activate your customer base towards advocacy
- What places do you need your customers to tell your story
- How do you incent them without making it look like you’re buying their advocacy
- How to systematize advocacy at your company
- Where to strategically place advocacy content to drive more revenue
Today, you need more and more, high-quality, educational content to earn the attention of your prospects. But creating that content at scale remains a challenge for most businesses and many marketing teams. In this episode, we’ll go deep on the different types of content and how to scale written, video, and audio content. We’ll share the secret to our Hub and Spoke Content Strategy that drives a significant amount of efficiency into the process and we’ll also talk about how to leverage video to produce a wide variety of content types also helping in the scale challenge. Easter Egg – Content Review and Recommendations
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What does the Hub and Spoke Content Strategy do for you?
- How to leverage content across all the social platforms in a scalable way
- What content do you need at each stage of the buyer journey and how to produce that in a scalable way
- How to use outside resources to produce content
- How to use tools to produce content
The roles inside your marketing and sales teams have changed dramatically over the past 10 years. Operations roles in both marketing and sales were unheard of even 5 years ago. Today with the number of technology tools being used, the importance of data and data quality, the automation of repetitive tasks, and the reporting required to make solid revenue-related decisions—the operations role is more important than ever before. In the show, we’ll talk about how to define the operations role, how to find the right team member(s) for the role(s) and how outside resources are a viable alternative to in-house team members.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- Detailed job descriptions for marketing and sales operations roles
- How do these new roles interact with campaign managers, and functional managers
- How sales and marketing view operations differently
- What kinds of skills and experience translate into revenue operations success?
- How an outside agency might be a better option to deliver revenue operations support
Marketing thinks it's a sales job to drive revenue. Sales thinks it's marketing’s job to generate sales-ready leads. Both groups are wrong. It’s everyone’s job in marketing, sales, and in customer service to work together to help your company hit its revenue goals month over month. In this episode, we’re joined by Joel Capperella, VP of Revenue Marketing at Workiva. Joel has extensive experience in marketing and has been a trailblazer when it comes to working with sales and service to help companies from a variety of industries hit their revenue goals.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to align marketing and sales into a single revenue team
- What goal-setting methodologies help
- What communication strategies work best
- How to open up the lines of feedback between sales and marketing so they are productive
- Who handles the operational issues that affect both groups?
If you want to improve revenue in 2022 and you want to do it quickly the best place to look is at the end of your sales process and the close rate on submitted proposals. You can double revenue by taking your 10% close rate to just 20%. Yep, that will double your revenue. What if you took it to 40%? In this episode, we’ll talk, in detail, about the client who came to us with a very low close rate and the upgrades and new initiatives we helped them add to take their close rate north of 80%. These sales process improvements changed the trajectory of their business and helped them exit.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to investigate your late-stage sales process and uncover issues that are hurting your close rate
- How to arm your sales reps with the right sales process that will guarantee to improve your close rate
- Why you need to think differently about the way you work with prospects, it's not about winning, it's about helping and guiding them
- How to train reps to execute at the end of the sales process to make signing an inevitability
- How to measure your opportunities to know when prospects are ready to get a proposal that will close
Everyone wants more leads. But you should want more quality leads. We’ll unpack how we helped this company go from 10 leads a month to 100 leads a month. The strategy included driving more visitors but deploying offers that appealed to prospects at all stages of the buyer journey, including late-stage buyers which often produce the best quality, sales-ready leads. We’ll unpack the omnichannel campaigns that drove leads and the high-impact website and landing page that converted the leads, including the nurture campaign that took prospects along their buyer journey encouraging them to convert with stage-specific offers.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to plan for this kind of lift and the strategy behind producing this level of results
- Getting more people to your website – organic, social, email, referral sites, paid search, paid social, organic social
- Turning more visitors into leads – story, content, website, blog, pillar pages, nurture
- How to build the omnichannel lead gen program brick by brick to ensure its enough to hit your lead goals
- How to create late-stage buyer journey offers that produce high-quality sales-ready leads
- How to make sure that your messaging resonates and drives people to act
- The timing required to 10x your lead generation efforts and the investment typically required
If you need more leads one of the fastest ways to generate leads is doing a better job converting visitors to your site from anonymous visitors into new marketing qualified leads. We’ll share a real story, from a real client who has an extremely low site-wide conversion rate and in just 30 days took their .5% conversion rate to 5% and generated a ton of new leads for the top of their pipeline. We’ll share the secrets to how we created conversions for top, middle, and late-stage buyer journeys and helped this company with an in less than a year.
What we’ll cover in the show –
– How to develop a conversion strategy that helps inform your content strategy
– How to create offers that convert for everyone visiting regardless of their buyer journey stage
– Best practices in landing page design and landing page conversion
– Where to put CTAs so that they convert at a higher rate
– What an optimization plan looks like once you launch your conversion plans
There are two kinds of businesses, ordinary and remarkable. When you look at ordinary businesses they generally struggle to grow. When you look at the remarkable businesses, they’re the ones that make growth look easy. The bottom line, those remarkable businesses worked hard to make their companies remarkable. They do something NO ONE else does and they get rewarded for it. If your business isn’t growing, it's probably not remarkable. Ask yourself, can our competitors say anything close to what we say about our business? If the answer is yes, you’re not remarkable. Change that and change the trajectory of your company.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to look across the industry and evaluate your company, are we remarkable?
- How to look inside the business and understand your customers enough to create a remarkable company
- How long it might take to actually create a remarkable company
- Why it needs the entire company to be active in this process
- It takes a lot of work; you have to be up for the challenge and the associated work to make a remarkable company
- Being remarkable never stops, what that means and how to never stop working on it
Sixty-five percent of the people surveyed identified themselves as visual learners, they want to watch instead of reading. YouTube is the second most popular search engine behind only Google. People want to watch videos. Your prospects and customers want to watch videos. If you’re not producing at least one new video a month, you’re falling behind. Not to mention video is not prominently used in sales and customer service to help close prospects faster and to help customers get what they need in a more efficient and more productive way. Video is how you’ll scale your content program in 2022.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to get started creating your own videos with just your iPhone
- Practical examples of video for some of the most common businesses
- How video scales better than written content
- How to use video on your website, in email, on social media
- How to leverage post-production resources to handle the technical aspect of video
CRMs have come a long way in the past five years. They used to be giant databases that kept track of prospects' contact information. Today they are vital tools that every sales organization should be using to automate, prioritize, and systematize the sales effort across the organization. It should be the single point of truth around what’s going on with every single prospect and customer in the company. If you’re not using it to that extent, you’re falling behind your competition and you’re leaving money on the table with regard to revenue opportunities that are going unattended. In this episode, we’ll help you fix that.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What your CRM should be doing and what it shouldn’t be doing
- How to get your reps to want to use the CRM
- How to get your leadership team to want to use the CRM
- How to get more from your sales reps by using the CRM, HINT: You don’t have to hire more reps to do more revenue
- How to get data out of the CRM so you make smart, data-driven sales-related decisions
You might think revenue generation is all about leads but in reality, it's all about closing the leads you have which points directly to your sales process. Is it documented? Is it available to every sales rep in the company? Is it optimized on a regular basis? Is it designed to ensure your reps are helping prospects feel safe? If you have to answer no to any of those questions then your sales process is probably preventing you from growing as fast as you could otherwise grow. We’ll dig into everything sales process and uncover easy ways for you to make that process better and close more new business faster.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- Why its critical that your sales process be documented and visual
- How to install your sales process into your CRM to drive 100% compliance with sales reps
- How to attach data to the sales process and uncover gaps or friction in your current sales process
- What metrics you should be tracking to evaluate the performance of your sales process
- Who’s responsible for upgrading the sales process over time and why
No matter how sophisticated or unsophisticated your marketing and sales efforts are today you have more data than any time in the history of business. Even if you don’t have a marketing automation platform you have data in Google and in your point solutions. Even if you have a basic CRM or use spreadsheets there is gold in that sales data. But if you have any automation or CRM tools, you’re likely overwhelmed by the amount of data available to you. How you sift through that data and uncover the insights buried in there will likely decide how quickly or how slowly you grow your company.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- How to make sure your data is clean, accurate, and comprehensive
- What skillsets you need to quickly interpret the data and uncover insights
- How those insights should inform your action planning efforts
- What those action plans must include in order to learn from your data
- Who in the organization needs to be intimate with your data, and have the ability to uncover these highly valuable insights
A lot of us are easily distracted today. Some people say we lack the attention span of a goldfish which is estimated at around 3 seconds. But when it comes to marketing being distracted, hopping around, constantly changing your mind is a clear path to underperformance. Trying a bunch of things in the hopes that something sticks are what we call random acts of marketing, a phrase we created years ago to describe what we see frequently when working with companies struggling to hit their revenue goals. When we call it out, many of our prospects have said, Yes, that sounds like us.
What we’ll cover in the show –
- What’s causing you to bounce from tactic to tactic
- Why random acts of marketing will never work
- The difference between random and well thought out marketing
- Why data can be your north star
- How to fill in the skills gap that might be causing you to do random acts of marketing
If you’re trying to generate revenue and grow your company you probably already figured out you can’t do everything you want to do when you want to do it. This means you have to make difficult decisions on prioritizing projects, initiatives, and investments. But do you know if you’re prioritizing properly? Do you work on marketing or sales first? Do you invest in marketing to customers or do you try to generate new customers? If you prioritize incorrectly, you’ll see poor performance. In this episode we’ll discuss how to prioritize, prioritization methodology, and how to sequence your initiative so they build on each other instead of blocking forward progress. What we’ll cover in the show –
· What comes first, marketing, sales, or customers service improvements
· Why it's different at every company
· Prioritization methodologies that will help you make solid decisions on what to do and when
· How frequently you should evaluate priorities and make changes
· What signals help you decide what gets attention and when
This show was planned a month ago. We pushed it when we talked about privacy, regulation, and the death of the MQL but we didn’t want to forget it. Generating revenue from your current customers is low-hanging fruit and should be harvested regularly. Your customer already know, like, and trust you so getting them to share their stories, buy more from you and unlock the full revenue potential in each existing customer should be a big part of your current revenue growth plan.What we’ll cover in the show –
· Innovative ways to turn your customers into advocates so they actively share their stories with other people like them
· How to keep the conversation going with current customers so they buy more but don’t feel like your trying to sell them more
·The techniques that unlock revenue potential in every one of your current customers
· What to expect when you start marketing to your customer base
· How to keep the marketing one-to-one and personal, so they feel special
You have aggressive growth goals, but you don’t have the team (internal or external) to execute the programs you need to support your goals. You might not even be aware of how much you need to do to drive to your revenue goals. In addition to actual bodies, you might be missing the skill sets needed. You might need more content and not have any writing resources. You might need sales operations skills and not have anyone who can handle that assignment. If you don’t have the right resources, you’ll never hit your goals. What we’ll cover in the show –
· How to ensure there is alignment between goals and the resources needed
· The difference between internal and external resources
· How to uncover what gaps might exist in your current execution
· How to fill those gaps and when internal is right and when external makes more sense
· How to know when its time to add resources and when it might be time to remove resources
Revenue generation is no longer an art. Today it's 100% science. Because it's so quantitative you need metrics in all three revenue growth areas. You need metrics in marketing, metrics in sales, and metrics in customer service. But it's not just about building and looking at dashboards. Someone on your team needs to be able to pull insights out of those metrics and then use those insights to inform your action plans. What we’ll cover in the show –
· What metrics should you be looking at
· Walk through the Revenue Cycle
· Whose responsibility is it to keep the metrics flowing and uncover the important insights
· How should you and your team be using those insights
· What tools might be needed to properly display metrics so the insights are visible
· What daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly rhythms are needed to stay on top of these numbers
If you’re struggling to grow revenue you might not have the right tools. Today you need more than a CRM. You need a revenue growth platform that includes marketing automation, sales automation commonly known as a CRM, and you need a service platform to ensure your prospects and customers get everything they need all through their time with your company. These tools help automate communication, track behavior, provide the ability to upgrade the prospect’s or customer’s digital experience with your company and they give you the data you need to uncover insights that should fuel your ongoing optimization activities. Without technology like this, you’ll be working in the dark and running highly inefficient efforts to do what today’s buyers need from you. What we’ll cover in the show –
· What today’s marketing automation technologies can do for you
· How you can be sure if your CRM is helping you or hurting you
· Why you also need customer service technology to go with your marketing and sales tech
· Why you should want a platform-based tool, as opposed to point solutions
· How these tools uncover fascinating insights that drive your action plans and improved results
Apple’s recent privacy changes got me thinking that this and other privacy changes are a reflection of how bad marketing has become over the past five years. Instead of trying to earn attention, marketers have been trying to buy attention and sneak into our attention streams. Now responsible companies are changing their tech to protect people and the government is looking at regulations to oversee companies like Facebook. Marketing has to get their act together fast and stop generating leads and start creating high-quality sales opportunities that close.
I think for some CEOs where to start when revenue languishes is a challenge. Do you look at sales, marketing, or at customer service? Where you should start is the prospects/customers' journey with your company. Redesigning these experiences is the ONLY way to create the kind of experience that accelerates revenue because it contributes to more effective marketing, sales, and customer service in a highly efficient way. What we’ll cover in the show –
· What a prospect’s buyer journey looks like
· How you identify ALL those the touchpoints in that journey
· How you go about enhancing those experiences
· What you measure when you start looking at initiatives designed around the buyer journey
· What business outcomes you’ll clearly see improving when you take this approach
Many people say they have a long-term plan around digital transformation, but they demand leads immediately. That pushes you to make different decisions around strategy, tactics you deploy, what you track and the technology you use. This leads to poor choices that affect the long-term viability of your new digital revenue growth strategy. You must take a long-term, continuous improvement approach to drive revenue. What we’ll cover in the show:
∙ Why short-term, get-me-leads-today thinking won’t produce revenue
∙ How quality over quantity produces more revenue faster
∙ How to align your goals (leads vs. revenue) across the company
∙ What does short-term mean? What does long-term mean?
∙ If leads are the wrong measure of success, what should you be measuring?
If you need more leads, if you need more sales opportunities converted into new customers, if you need more revenue from current customers then you need to invest in these areas. The more you invest, the bigger the lift and the faster improvements impact results. Many companies skimp on this and end up being disappointed when it's their own fault for under-investing in growth. What we’ll cover in the show –
· Are you investing enough to generate the number of leads and new customers you need to grow? How do you know?
· How do you align what you need with what you should be spending?
· How do you keep track of the actual results when revenue might be trailing by months or longer?
· What are reasonable results after 30 days, 60 days, 90 days, longer?
· How to get everyone (internally and externally) on the same page around both investment and expected results?
Show Summary - Your prospects and customers don’t care about your internal departments, they want a single and remarkable experience from everyone at your company. You need complete alignment across all three areas to drive revenue. What we’ll cover in the show:
- Your customers don’t care about your internal departments
- How a seamless and remarkable prospect/customer experience drives revenue
- The leakages pulling revenue down when your departments are NOT aligned
- How to get, keep and enhance alignment (SLAs, shared goals, revenue teams)
- How alignment improves revenue by the numbers
CEOs everywhere are asking: What’s wrong with revenue? Why aren’t we growing? How come we can’t hit our revenue goals?
In this episode of What’s Wrong With Revenue?, Mike Lieberman, CEO at Square 2, and Eric Keiles, CMO at Square 2, discuss and break down why strategy is one of the missing elements in the revenue generation strategy at most companies. They share stories and examples of how strategy needs to be part of marketing, sales and customer service, too.
They also share practical examples of how strategy drives tactics, analytics and technology decisions across your entire company. You’ll be thinking differently about your company’s strategy after listening to this episode.