Smash The Funnel - The Secrets To Massive Revenue Growth

There Are Many Choices When It Comes To CRM, But Only One That’s Right For You

Customer relationship management (CRM) software for your company is no longer optional. You must have CRM. Today’s buyer journey and the requirements for your sales effort are far too demanding.

Your homegrown industry system or old-school tools won’t cut it, either. GoldMine, Act! and Excel spreadsheets are ill-equipped to handle the demands of today’s fast-paced, prospect-centric sales process.

If you have a CRM and you’re not using it, it’s clearly not the right one for you. If you’re using only part of the feature set, you’re not getting full value for what you’ve purchased.

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B2C Websites Are Redefining The Visitor Experience And Raising The Bar On Responsiveness

Your grandfather’s chat tool is a thing of the past. Today, almost everyone has bought or interacted with companies via chat. It’s one of the more acceptable channels, and in some cases, it’s the most efficient channel.

I’ve even heard a few people say they prefer to talk with companies via chat. This is primarily because large retail brands and their super-duper websites have elevated the bar around how we interact with companies.

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What’s The Difference, Why Should You Care And What Should You Expect From Both?

Over the past few years, there has been a lot of conversation about inbound marketing. Is it a real thing? Isn’t it just part of solid online marketing? While we believe strongly in its application, not everyone agrees.

What about demand generation and newer methodologies like account-based marketing (ABM), conversational marketing and influencer marketing?

We do our best to help readers, fans and followers with the typical decisions a lot of companies are facing when it comes to agency selection. If you’re trying to decide which type of agency is right for you, here are a few tips and guidelines to use while you work on your selection process.

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What Is LinkedIn’s Role In The World Of Marketing?

Anyone else feeling like LinkedIn has become a dumping ground for unsolicited, unproven, unfocused and continuously unhelpful information?

I know that social media is in a bit of a holding pattern right now. No one can really figure out how to use it to do anything other than publish content in an attempt to grab some attention.

I think most people realize that this approach is far from effective, even if it’s highly efficient.

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Email Campaigns Can Produce Dramatic Results If You’re Smart About The Campaign Specifics

We all have examples of bad email marketing campaigns. I just had one this morning. No links, no compelling messaging, no personalization, no list segmentation — just spray and pray.

I understand that for some people the ability to click a button and send out 100,000 emails is too attractive to think through logically. The cost is low, the conversion rate is lower and the amount of people you’ll piss off, turn off and annoy is huge.

People are going to do it anyway because it’s easy. But it’s not right. It’s not the best way to handle email. Today, you have so many better ways to use email to drive revenue.

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Too Much Data Exists For Humans To Efficiently Provide The Guidance You Need

We’re a long way from Skynet taking over the world, and we’re a long way from having software eliminate the need for human beings to be part of the marketing, sales and servicing improvement conversation.

But the added complexity associated with the buyer journey and how marketing, sales and customer service teams evaluate performance, gain insights and drive improvements is starting to demand additional tools that make this a perfect application for artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.

Today, the people responsible for driving revenue growth (the revenue team, which is made up of marketing, sales and customer service leaders) are overwhelmed with data, overwhelmed with the ability to create custom dashboards to monitor that data and overwhelmed by the sheer number of actions that could be taken to improve results.

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One Role Or One Person Can’t Drive Strategy When It Comes To Revenue Growth

When results start to stagnate or decline, the first move is to double down on tactics, but the tactics are incredibly complex and multi-faceted. Plus, in some cases, they take time to gain traction.

What happens next is people start questioning the strategy — and they should. In most cases, underperforming programs do suffer from a lack of strategy, but you can’t expect one person to be the owner of that strategy.

If you’re working with an agency, you want your entire team (strategist, consultant, writer, editor, designer and interactive team members) to be included in the strategy conversation.

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Sometimes Following People Who Have Done What You're Trying To Do Is The ONLY Path Forward

On Wednesday, we celebrated our country’s independence. Many people have fought for our country, and many continue to fight for us to have the rights and freedoms no other country in the world provides its citizens.

This fight requires leadership, vision and perseverance even when the prospect of success seems dim. It’s interesting to consider the process of building leaders, and how it might provide lessons for people trying to grow their companies, lead their teams and create consistent revenue growth month over month.

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Run These As Experiments Against Your Baseline Performance For The Most Dramatic Results

At Square 2 Marketing, we run a ton of tests and experiments every month. Those test results are shared across the entire team to help us build better-performing programs for our clients in a more efficient way (we get results faster).

When you’re on your own, running tests and experiments on your program means you have fewer experiences and fewer test results.

When we run them, we might have results from 50 clients in just a few weeks. We’ve taken a collection of the best-performing, test-proven upgrades to landing pages and shared them with you here.

Enjoy!

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Trying To Grow Your Company Is Hard If You’re On Your Own

The Association for Talent Development (ATD) did a study on accountability and found that if you commit to someone, you have a 65% chance of completing a goal. If you have a specific accountability appointment with the person you’ve committed to, your chance of success increases to 95%.

When it comes to revenue generation, shifting from doing it yourself to working with an agency often can be the difference between success and failure.

It’s not for lack of effort or even investment. Sometimes you just need to work with other people to gain from their experience, skip some of the inevitable potholes on the journey and find those fast tracks that others have used to produce better results quicker.

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