A Massive Checklist Of 25 Things You Need To Do To Generate Revenue

When it comes to hitting your month-over-month revenue goals, you have to do a lot of things well and do all of them simultaneously. It’s like juggling a bowling ball and a chainsaw while you eat an entire pizza and drink a 64 oz. soda. It’s not easy for the ordinary person.

Even if you do nine out of 10 things, that one missing thing might be the difference between successful and disappointing program results.

With CMOs getting fired at the highest clip in 20 years and recessionary fears making marketing departments the first ones on the chopping block, you can’t afford to make any mistakes today.

Here are the 25 items you need to do simultaneously to drive revenue.

1. Properly Fund Your Lead Generation Efforts

If you underfund this effort, it’s never going to work. You can’t generate hundreds of leads a month for only $1,000 a month. Understand the relationship between your expected results and a proportionate investment in generating those results. Read this to help you set your 2023 budget based on revenue goals. 

2. Audit, Clean And Segment Your Data

Data is everything today. Almost everyone tells us their data is a mess but expects us to use it to produce results. Not happening. You have to clean up your data and make sure it’s first-party data (meaning you collected it and didn’t buy it or rent it from someone else). You need tools to keep your data clean and organized so it’s useful for marketing, sales and customer service.

3. Set Performance KPIs

I get it, your leadership team wants quantitative data on the performance of your efforts. That’s fine, but agree up front on what metrics you’re going to be tracking and when, what successful performance looks like quantitatively and that your metrics will change over time as your program matures.

4. Create Compelling Messages

If you don’t have anything interesting to say, just give up right now. Generic or vanilla company messaging is not going to produce results. If you sound just like your competitors, you’re not going to produce results. You need a company story that is emotional, engaging, disruptive and differentiating. Without it, you’re dead in the water.

5. Create Content That Attracts And Converts

Today’s marketing is highly content driven. The more content you create, the better the quality and the more you use it in campaigns, the more leads you usually generate. You have to create enough content to sustain your story, engage your audience, target your prospects and produce the necessary leads, sales opportunities and new customers to hit your key performance indicators (KPIs).

6. Challenge Your Leadership Team To Create Highly Provocative Thought Leadership Content

Part of the content effort is to take a stand, build a platform, be disruptive and position your company as a thought leader. The more “out there” you can get with your content, the better your entire marketing will perform

7. Expand Content To Include Audio And Video

Content today must include audio and video. Both formats are mandatory in the content strategy you’re rolling out. Audio and video can be used efficiently in social media, in email campaigns, on your website and even in sales nurture emails. Think out of the box and produce highly creative pieces to help tell your story.

8. Build A Wonderfully Engaging Website

If your website is an online brochure, it’s a miss. Instead, you need a highly interactive, highly engaging and well-designed website to help you get found, drive new visitors and convert those visitors into new contacts. The site must be planned, designed and built with that in mind. It has to tell your story and work flawlessly to attract new people while turning them into fans of your business

9. Create An Effective Email And Lead Nurture Cadence

Once a new contact converts, it’s just the beginning of their journey with your company, and what you do next is critical. You must continue the conversation in a way that educates but doesn’t push or sell. The email you send has to be highly engaging, be educational and stand out against the rest of the dreck landing in your prospect’s inbox.

10. Include SMS In Your Nurture Sequences

Speaking of cutting through the clutter, today text messages are one of the best tools in the tool kit. People respond to texts, but these too have to be highly educational and can’t be spammy. Marketers are still trying to find the balance. For example, offer them something special (not public) and highly valuable via text. That way they’ll welcome your message and not block it.

11. Design An Orchestrated Campaign Targeting Prospects

Start grouping your tactics into an orchestrated and omnichannel campaign. Create campaign messaging that ties into your overall big story. Target your campaign to a narrow audience and create personalized content that makes the campaign feel like it’s one-to-one, not one-to-many. Figure out performance expectations, timing and the assets you need to run the campaign and let it fly.

12. Design An Orchestrated Campaign Targeting Customers

Don’t forget about customers when you’re putting your campaign plans together. Often neglected, these people already know, like and trust you, so they should be getting regular campaign outreach to help them expand their spending with you.

13. Launch Paid Social Ads

If you’re running demand generation campaigns, then social media ads are going to be a great way to get your story and content in front of people who might not know you. Pick a platform, get that to work and then move on to the next platform. All social platforms don’t work equally for all businesses. Make sure you’re not spending too much money when you compare spending with results.

14. Launch Paid Search Ads

If you’re running demand generation campaigns, you might want to consider running paid search ads on Google and/or Bing. People doing searches related to your products, services or adjacent information should know you exist, and with some compelling ad copy, they should be just a click away from visiting your new website.

15. Launch Retargeting Ads

The data is very clear that most people don’t convert on their first visit to your website. Following them around the web and serving them ads that provide additional value based on your website pages they’ve already visited can be an excellent tactic for getting them back to the site.

16. Track And Optimize For Organic Search

If you’re running an inbound approach and you want your site to be highly ranked for important keywords, phrases or questions, you must focus on how your site ranks on the search engines. This requires optimizing those pages, creating content that ranks and tracking the number of people coming to your site from organic searches.

17. Publish Your Content To Social

Your prospects are checking you out on social – not just your corporate pages but your personal pages too. Make sure both are updated with the current look and feel of your website. Those transitionary experiences should be seamless. Then make sure you’re publishing educational content to both corporate and personal pages. Marketing automation tools like HubSpot make this easy.

18. Align Your Marketing Efforts With Sales

Marketing shouldn’t be working in a vacuum. Get sales and marketing rowing in the same direction. Make sure sales knows everything marketing is doing. Get feedback from sales on all your marketing campaigns and initiatives. Include sales when planning how people will be followed up as part of your marketing outreach. I’ve seen too many reps who don’t know about specific campaigns and don’t follow up with high-quality prospects, limiting the performance of a marketing campaign.

19. Make Sure Sales Is Following Up On Your Leads

Better yet, don’t leave this to chance. Sit down with sales and map out exactly what actions you want them to take after you serve them a new lead. How quickly do you want them to follow up? What email or phone call do you want them to execute? What content do they need to deliver? What conversation do they need to have with the new prospect? Map it out in great detail.

20. Arm Sales With The Right Tools

Provide sales with all the tools they need to take your new lead and close it. This might be email templates, content, videos, invitations, pricing, presentations or articles. Every step in the sales process should have an aligned set of tools mapped directly to it. There should be no ambiguity. Make these tools as personalized as possible by vertical, role or issue, and make sure the reps are clear on how and when to use everything you arm them with.

21. Analyze Tactic And Campaign Performance

Set up regular rhythms to analyze overall performance and campaign performance. Some metrics can be looked at daily, while others can be checked weekly or monthly. Make optimization decisions when you have enough data to be sure the insights you uncovered are accurate.

22. Uncover The Insights Buried In The Data

Uncovering insights buried in your data is going to take time and experience. Think about it like peeling back layers of an onion. First, you look at A, then perhaps that same data over a longer time period to see trends. Next, you look at B and compare B to C. Perhaps you’re looking at today’s campaign vs. last quarter’s campaign or today’s performance vs. last month and then the same month from last year. Over time, you’ll start to see what the data is telling you.

23. Creating Ongoing Optimization Action Plans

Once you have your insights, you’re ready to build out an action plan. This is typically used to optimize the campaigns toward improved performance. You might need new creative, new copy or an entirely new offer.

You may need to adjust the budget or targeting criteria to dial in a better-quality lead. You might be generating leads but no sales opportunities, which might cause you to look at the nurtures going out to those new conversions. Don’t make too many changes at once. Go slow, be patient and be persistent. When you change one element, you’ll know its impact. When you change more than one, you might not know which change drove what results.

24. Make Sure You Deployed The Right Tech Stack

You’re going to need technology to manage all these activities – a customer relationship management (CRM) tool for sales follow-up and tracking for sure but also marketing automation to execute all your campaigns efficiently. You’ll need a content management system (CMS) for your website so you can make changes quickly without needing help from IT or website coders.

You should consider a customer service management tool as well so you’re looking at the full chronology of your prospect’s journey with you from click to close and through purchase history for the life of their time with your company.

25. Ensure You’re Using The Tech Stack To Its Full Complement Of Features

A lot of companies buy tech tools and never use them to their full extent. Make sure you know what you’re buying or what you bought. Use the chatbots, chat tools and personalization features on your website and landing page tool kit

Use the lead-scoring module to help sales reps focus on their best prospects. Use integrated messaging tools so customers can contact you on any platform at any time and someone will be able to respond quickly.

Remember, the experience with your company has to be remarkable to drive repeatable, scalable and predictable revenue growth.

It’s not one thing you have to do to drive revenue, it’s ALL these things. If even one of these is missing, you’re going to see reduced business outcomes.