Smash The Funnel - The Secrets To Massive Revenue Growth

Demand Generation And Content Marketing Drive Awareness, Leads And New Customers

According to HubSpot research, businesses with aligned sales and marketing teams achieve 208% more revenue when compared to those with misaligned teams.

Synergy always seems to drive better results than disparate teams working in silos. The same holds true when it comes to content marketing and your demand generation execution. Just like wine and cheese, these two marketing tactics are better together. 

However, before we move forward, it might make sense to help people understand the differences between demand gen and content marketing. I’ve seen tons of articles that mistakenly classify content marketing as a strategy when, in fact, it’s a set of tactics. I’ve also seen a lot of posts that classify demand gen as a set of tactics when, in fact, it’s an approach or strategy.

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You Might Think This Is Easy, But Data And Experience Tell A Different Story

You’re working hard to generate enough leads to drive you well past your revenue goals, but something’s going wrong when sales picks up the leads and you’re not sure what. While people in sales have always done what they wanted with little input from marketing, now it seems like this might be a bigger issue than you originally thought. What do you do?

Sound familiar? Leads are going up, but revenue is remaining stagnant and sales is still complaining about the quality and quantity of leads that marketing generates. You’re not crazy; prospect handoffs between marketing and sales are a real issue. Our research shows a lot more can be done to make sure the prospect has a smooth and positive experience once sales gets involved.

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Content Marketing Just Got A Whole Lot More Complicated

We’ve been providing content marketing strategy and content marketing services for clients since we opened our doors in 2003. By far, one of the most common questions from prospects and clients is, “How much content do we need and what should our content say?” In other words, they want to know what content to create and how frequently to create it.

I think this is an industrywide challenge. Agencies don’t know the answer to these questions, so in general, they answer with “more!” The more content, the better. They typically handle the “what to create” part by trying to identify the questions prospects are asking and then attempting to answer those questions with content.

Both approaches are reasonable (even though they are simplistic and generic), and while they might move the needle, today a much more scientific and effective approach exists for answering these important content marketing questions.

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It's No Longer Acceptable To Have Sales And Marketing Running Different Playbooks

Sales and marketing departments have been separated since the beginning of time. But prospects are now demanding a single buyer experience, and that requires the evolution of revenue generation to match today’s buyer behavior.

One of the most important factors in creating a scalable, repeatable and predictable revenue machine is sales and marketing alignment. The separation between sales and marketing is one of the legacy artifacts that has to be retired.

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Fewer Than 25% Of People Report Exceeding Their Revenue Goals, And The People Who Are Missing Their Revenue Goals Don’t Know Why

In a recent HubSpot study, 23% of people reported they were exceeding their revenue goals. And of those not exceeding their goals, a whopping 74% said they did not know the number of visitors, leads, MQLs or sales opportunities they needed to hit their targets.

This data is not surprising, but it’s disappointing that even with all of the new tools, analytics, software and dashboards available, a huge number of people still don’t know how to drive the right metrics at the right times to produce the right results.

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How You Market Your Company Is Going To Change, And Why The Government Is More Likely To Tell You What You Can And Cannot Do

Most companies and most marketers are already aware of CASL and GDPR, especially companies in Canada and Europe. U.S. companies need to get ready, because similar regulations are likely coming to the U.S., and they are going to be challenging.

How do I know? What’s making me write about this today? Spend five minutes watching Mark Zuckerberg, CEO at Facebook, testify in front of the Senate committee investigating the Russian situation and you’ll see what I see.

The government has lost all trust that Facebook or any other social media company has any capability to protect the privacy of the American people, and government officials are likely to take matters into their own hands. You should consider watching some of the testimony.

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Want To Know If Your Reps Have Any Hope Of Hitting Their Quota? Uncover The Truth

Companies have just as much trouble forecasting sales, following up on leads and closing new customers as they do generating new leads. This is typically referred to as sales execution.

We learned that early in our history when a client’s marketing program took them from 30 leads a month to 300 leads a month but revenue remained flat. We had to jump into action, and we quickly found that their sales team was a mess.

The sales enablement practice at Square 2 Marketing is designed to help clients with sales process, sales rep training, sales tools, sales communication and sales metrics. Lately we’ve been talking a lot about the new key performance indicators (KPIs) sales leaders should be looking at, and today we have another new one to share.

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Experience, Reviews, Leadership And Reputation Contribute To This List Of Leading Digital Agencies

Looking for a digital agency to help you with revenue generation? You’re in for a challenging journey. Today, thousands of digital agencies work on web, social, email, search, content and sales enablement for their clients.

Picking the right agency for your company is a little like trying to find a needle in an entire farm filled with haystacks. Knowing what’s important to you is key, and we’ve previously discussed the need to define your list of requirements before you even start looking at and talking to agencies.

But eventually you’ll be getting your list together. To help, here are the agencies that we think should be on your list and why. This isn’t a list of our friends or agencies that we deem as not competitive. The list includes agencies we respect because of their leadership, feedback we’ve collected from their clients and prospects, the quality of their teams, and their ability to help you with both marketing and sales.

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It Might Sound Like A Subtle Difference, But It’s Like Comparing A Baseball Team To A Symphony Orchestra

Sixteen years ago, when I was the VP of marketing for a $25 million up-and-coming software company, everyone talked about integrated digital marketing. Today, I couldn’t even tell you what that meant, because it feels like so much has happened over the past decade. So much has changed, and the pace of change has accelerated since then.

What I do know is that today’s revenue generation needs much more than an integrated approach; it needs an orchestrated approach. A baseball team is integrated; you have different players on the field with the right of combination of skills. The pitcher throws hard, the outfield is fast and the infield has range. You have guys who hit for average, others who can steal a base and then the power hitters in the middle of the lineup. You need them all to win, but they provide individual contributions over the course of the game.

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Key Performance Metrics Are Critical For Sales Enablement Improvements

Most people today have realized that marketing is a science, but a lot fewer people know that sales is equally scientific. While it has a different set of metrics, we track and optimize a wide variety of sales execution metrics for clients. One of the best metrics (and least understood) is pipeline velocity.

Pipeline velocity is defined as the speed by which leads move through your pipeline, whether won or lost. What’s interesting about the pipeline velocity metric is that you should care more about the changes in the number over time than you should about the actual number. In other words, pipeline velocity data is only relevant when compared to the velocity over time.

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