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, t...
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 alig...
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...
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 tod...
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 Syste...
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...
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 reve...
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 exper...
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...
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 ...
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 ...
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 pro...
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 ans...
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 lear...
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 m...
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...
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, ...
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 co...
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...
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...
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...
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 r...
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...
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 togeth...
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, wh...
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 companie...
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 yea...
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 p...
