With the holidays behind us, it’s back to business, and your first objective is to exceed your goals in January, in the first quarter and for the entire year of 2023.
Unfortunately, that is one major challenge with companies today. When we talk with CEOs and ask them how frequently they hit their goals, the answers are surprisingly horrible. Typically, only about 10% of CEOs publicly state they can consistently hit their revenue goals.
More bad news – many marketing experts are stating that the digital playbook many companies use is failing to produce the same results from four or five years ago.
Hopefully, you’ve factored these challenges into your 2023 plans, but if you didn’t we’re going to share the Square 2 playbook for getting off to a great start in January and exceeding your goals in 2023.
Specifically, there are six areas you’ll need to focus on to create a repeatable, scalable and predictable revenue generation system.
This means a clear understanding of what you and your team are accountable for and what everyone is doing on a weekly, monthly and quarterly basis.
Not only what they are doing but why they are doing it, how activities get prioritized, the speed at which people accomplish their tasks and how aligned all those tasks are to the company’s overall revenue-related goals.
The strategy we’re talking about here is very specific. Think about it more like the blueprint for building an amazing house or the recipe for an amazing chocolate cake.
Without the blueprints or the recipes, it’s likely that the final output will be a mess. The house could collapse, and the cake will taste horrible.
We see the missing strategy piece when it comes to revenue generation all too frequently. The result is what you probably see now: random acts of marketing, poor-performing marketing results, inefficient and bumpy sales efforts and the big one — missed revenue goals.
Once you set your strategy, these issues are quickly and easily resolved.
When we talk about strategy, we mean clearly defining your target audience and the personas for those people. These personas need to be detailed and complete, including an intimate understanding of where they get their information and what digital watering holes they use today.
The strategy includes well-defined differentiation. We actually refer to this as what makes your company remarkable. Consider Seth Godin’s Purple Cow metaphor. What makes your company a purple cow in your industry?
Your strategy is also going to need to include your big story and specifically the messages associated with communicating your differentiation and value proposition in a way that emotionally engages your personas in wanting to do business with your company.
Finally, the way people buy today is different from the way they bought even five years ago, and we call this the buyer journey. Every step in the buyer journey needs to be identified, mapped out and then aligned with your marketing touches, sales touches and customer service touches.
The better you align these touches and provide a remarkable educational experience, the faster you’ll close new business and the better your marketing and sales efforts will produce the business outcomes you’ve been missing.
Everything above makes up your strategy, and all of that is critical to helping you grow your business.
You’ll need an entirely new set of marketing tactics to generate leads, but there are essentially two sets of tactics to consider.
First are the foundational tactics that you absolutely need, like a website, email campaigns, social accounts and certain content assets.
Then there are lead generation tactics that might change depending on what types of people you’re trying to attract to the company.
But evaluating and selecting these tactics and organizing the tactics so they are designed around your specific goals is key to getting the results you expect.
Just running tactics for lead generation isn’t going to cut it in 2023. Today, you need to organize these tactics into well-designed campaigns.
It actually takes a specific skill set, methodology and approach to get a campaign to produce results.
Just ask our client that after 30 days of their specific campaign saw a new client worth over $1 million in new revenue come directly from the paid search component of their new campaign. That’s the kind of results you should be looking for.
But to realize this type of result, your campaigns need to be built with enough budget to reach your target personas. They need to have the right assets, be launched through the right channels and, most importantly, be optimized over time to take the insights buried in the data and design ongoing action plans to adjust the campaigns based on performance.
It’s a complex set of executables that most in-house marketing teams and many agencies are still figuring out.
I hope you are starting to get the idea of how complicated an effort it is to generate revenue today. The days of salespeople picking up the phones or marketing people signing up for trade shows are long gone.
Specifically, you’re going to need technology to help automate as much as possible. Since we’re creating a system, we want it to be highly efficient. You’re going to want sales reps sending the same email at the same time in your newly designed sales process.
You are going to want to automate marketing outreach while making it personal and highly targeted based on role, industry or even their issues.
You’re going to want your data in one place where it can be segmented and kept accurate so that everyone has access to the same single source of truth.
Finally, you’re going to want to use these technology tools to get the analytics you need to continuously improve your efforts and optimize all aspects of marketing, sales and customer service. Without technology, you’ll be flying blind.
Finally, you can’t do this with half of a resource like you might have done before. You can’t have your office admin handling marketing. You need a team of highly trained, expertly skilled and experienced people who have done this before.
In today’s economic environment, hiring might be off the table, which means turning to an agency that has done these hundreds of times for hundreds of companies just like yours.
Regardless of how you staff this effort, it’s going to need people, and you need to figure out if you have to train up your current team, add new people to your team, supplement your team with outside experts or lean completely on those outside experts to get them working for you.
How you staff and how you support your efforts is equally as important as all the other aspects covered in this article.
You should see now that there are very good reasons your revenue has been inconsistent. You should see that you have to cover all six areas of this process to create the revenue generation system you’ve always been seeking.
Now that the information has been shared, the next move is yours. Take the system schematic and install it at your company or engage with someone who can do this for you. Either way, it’s the only way to create scalable, predictable and repeatable revenue at companies like yours.