Smash The Funnel - The Secrets To Massive Revenue Growth

The Pace Of Change In Marketing And Sales Is Accelerating: What Are You Doing About It?

None of us can get to every conference, but when I have the pleasure of attending one of the year’s best conferences, I like to share those experiences with all of you.

I recently returned from one of the best conferences, SiriusDecisions’ annual summit in Austin, Texas. This is my second time attending and our agency’s third. This is the first time we exhibited. What I love about this conference is the high level of attendee (CEOs, CMOs and VPs of both marketing and sales) and a heavy focus on technology solutions.

What I also love about this conference is the level of thought leadership shared by the SiriusDecisions team. If you don’t know this company, I like to refer to them as the Gartner of sales and marketing.

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If You’re Not Working On This Now, You Can Be Sure Your Competitors Are Ahead Of You

We’re a strategic revenue growth agency. All that means is we try to help our clients rise above the ocean of marketing tactics and look more holistically at how they’re making each prospect’s buyer journey easier, more educational and more personal.

It also means helping our clients understand how that ties directly to driving them to exceed their revenue goals month in and month out.

This always includes looking at marketing, sales and customer service for ways to improve the experience for prospects and customers. It means knowing what to say to whom and when to say it. That’s the strategy. But there is much more.

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The World May Never Know, Because Only You Know Your Customer

If you’re old enough, you get the subtle references to the old Tootsie Pop commercial that showed a wise old owl and a young boy discussing how many licks it takes to get to the center of a Tootsie Pop. The owl attempts to find out but can’t wait and bites the candy to get to the chocolaty inside.

If you want to see the old commercial, click here to watch it.

A similar age-old question challenges marketing and salespeople to this day: How many touches does it take to turn a prospect into a customer?

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Sales Teams Can Use Social Media To Drive Much More Than Appointments

We all get awful emails in our social media inboxes. These messages come with questions like, “Can I get five minutes of your time?,” “Would you like to see a demo of our software?” and “My CEO is going to be in your area; does Tuesday at 10 a.m. work for you?”

Today, it seems like hardly anyone is using social media in a constructive, helpful, educational and prospect-centric way.

Instead, most people, internal marketing teams and agencies seem to think social media is simply a superhighway for the worst of what marketing is today. Send out a thousand connect emails, and hopefully you’ll get one or two people to take you up on the offer.

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If You Want To Close More Deals, Give Prospects More

With more and more people talking about, asking about and working on sales enablement, it’s good to know what’s at the heart of this new type of sales improvement technique.

Ultimately, any sales-related improvements should be designed to produce a higher close rate and a shorter sales cycle. Sales enablement work is no different.

But sales enablement (done right) isn’t directly about asking better questions. It’s not about any specific sales process. It doesn’t include reaching out on LinkedIn or using a secret email that everyone responds to.

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Your Content Needs To Be Part Of A Holistic Approach

Billions of pieces of content are produced annually. But just as much of that content is generic and indistinguishable, the content strategies that produce it tend to be half-baked or, even worse, nonexistent.

The content craze has reached a point where most businesses are creating content without any real purpose or thought. Content has become an obligation everyone feels they need to fulfill rather than a powerful tool that uses strategy to marry customer needs and business goals.

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These Simple Homepage Upgrades Can Drive Big Growth In Lead Numbers

I’ve probably looked at (for the sake of evaluation) over 25,000 homepages.

We end up working with many of those companies to help improve their sites, so I’ve had the benefit of watching as our recommendations and upgrades produce the desired results.

Today, we evaluate and provide website homepage recommendations to almost anyone who contacts us. A lot of those recommendations are similar, and all are designed to produce improved results. 

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Gone Are 12-Month Plans, Dedicated Strategy Time And A Defined Set Of Deliverables

For 15 years prior to Square 2, I worked in corporate marketing.

Every October and November, we cleared the decks and worked on the upcoming year’s marketing strategy and plan. It took weeks to get the plan together, it was comprehensive and then it required a presentation to the management team for approval.

Once approved, the book went on the shelf, and I admit that I rarely looked at the plan again.

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Simply Put: Do You Want Work, Or Do You Want Results?

I get it: A statement of work (SOW) clearly defines what you’re buying. But is that the best way to get what your company ultimately needs?

Do you need work, or do you need results? What happens when the scope of work has to change (because SOWs change 95% of the time)?

A lot of agencies will jump at the chance to put together an SOW and get it over to you. You review it and it looks like it’s what you need.

But how can you be sure? How does the agency know it’s exactly right? What happens when you learn something new, change the requirements or together decide that you need different work, different tactics or an altogether different strategy?

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Sales Hacker defines sales operations as “the unit, role, activities and processes within a sales organization that support, enable and drive front-line sales teams to sell better, faster and more efficiently.”

In a blog article on the topic, Sales Hacker go on to say that “more than anything else, sales operations brings a system to selling. This often-overlooked and sometimes underappreciated department uses data to drive strategy, best practices to guide training and technology to hack success.”

It’s this systems thinking that makes sales hum, and when you’re looking for a repeatable, scalable and predictable revenue generation machine, you need to be thinking sales operations.

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