The Thanksgiving Meal Square 2 Serves Clients To Finish The Year Strong

Creating The Perfect Blend Of Revenue Generation Tactics Is Like Creating A Wonderful Meal

It’s been a challenging year for almost all of us, both personally and professionally. This Thanksgiving isn’t going to be our normal celebration, but it should be a celebration nonetheless.

There is still a lot to be thankful for. Stopping to appreciate your family, your friends, your health and the opportunities that still await you is important for your inner self.

Not everyone is thriving. If you’re not, be strong. If you’re doing well, be thankful and take time to help someone who’s not as lucky. Helping others is what makes us good humans, and being a good person is more important than ever.

Now on to dinner.

Generating revenue is like putting together a wonderful Thanksgiving meal. You need the perfect combination of foods, the perfect recipe for those dishes and the ability to present your meal to your friends and family so everyone has a wonderful experience.

There are so many similarities to building a revenue generation program for your business.

Here’s the perfect combination of program tactics from the team at Square 2. Remember, without a plan and the recipes, the outcome would be disappointing. Strategy without tactics is a recipe for disaster. But assuming you have the strategy down, here you go.

The Turkey – Your Website

Just like the turkey is the focal point of your meal, your website is the focal point of your marketing efforts. Almost all of your marketing campaign efforts should be directing people to your website for more information and to convert them from anonymous visitors into identified leads.

Your turkey has to look amazing, and so does your website. People eat with their eyes, and your prospects are deciding if they want to stick around and learn more based on how they initially feel when they land on your site.

Then, of course, the turkey has to taste amazing. This means your website has to offer amazing educational content and an amazing experience. If you can deliver this you should have people coming back again and again to get more, just like when people ask for seconds you know they love the food.

The Stuffing – Your Content

Everyone knows the best part of Thanksgiving dinner isn’t always the turkey, and in most cases, it’s the stuffing (or dressing, depending on your part of the country).

In our world, this means the content you’re creating. After your website, it’s the most important part of your program, so don’t underestimate its importance.

It has to be thought-leadership-level content. It has to take a stand. It has to be bold, disruptive and compelling. It has to cause your prospects to want to act.

It has to be available in a variety of formats, including video, audio, graphic and written. It has to be created in a way that allows your prospects to easily consume it, remember it and want to come back for more.

Finally, it has to be deployed properly. It has to be placed on the right pages of your website. It needs to be used properly in lead nurturing, in email campaigns, on social media and in the sales process.

If you served amazing stuffing right after dessert, people would be surprised and maybe even a little upset. Don’t make the same mistake with your content. Know when you need which pieces and deploy them correctly.

The Cranberry Sauce – Lead Nurturing

After all the bird and rich stuffing, you need a bit of a palate cleanser, and the cranberry sauce never disappoints. Bright, tart, cool and sweet, this Thanksgiving staple adds zip to the meat.

Your lead nurturing effort needs to deliver a similar result. If you want to simplify it down to its core, lead nurturing allows you to continue the conversation after your prospect has left your website.

Just like any conversation, if the topics and the tone are boring, self-serving or flat, you’re checking out. But if the topics are exciting, educational and helpful, you’re engaging even more.

Lead nurturing emails and content don’t often get the attention they deserve. It’s like opening a can of cranberry jelly and plopping it on the table – no bueno!

Instead, craft a well-designed and well-thought-out nurture strategy that presents highly relevant offers to keep your prospect engaged with your company. Proactively work to move them through their buyer journey by giving them a chance to signal to you that they are progressing.

You won’t turn leads into sales opportunities if you can’t nurture your active prospects.

The Potatoes – Chat

The potatoes, whether mashed, au gratin or baked, are another Thanksgiving staple. Today, chat has to be just as available if you want to create a remarkable experience on your website and allow prospects to identify themselves as ready to talk.

Just like the variety of potatoes available, there are a variety of ways to use chat. You can answer questions, you can qualify visitors, you can direct visitors to parts of the site more easily, you can serve up additional content and you can tee up sales leads for sales.

You can even use chat to eliminate the gates from your content offers, which should free up your visitors to get everything you offer without worrying about sharing their email or contact info.

There are only positives here, no negatives. There are no risks associated with adding chat to your website, only rewards. But you should hurry. Chat is becoming more and more prevalent, and chat-blindness is also quickly becoming a thing.

Here is a story about a company that removed their chat bubble and with just a link saw a 62% increase in conversations. It’s real, so pay attention to it.

The Greens – Late-Stage Buyer Journey Offers

This is a must-have item at the Square 2 table. No, not the green beans. Almost everyone knows the greens are the least popular part of the dinner, but you have to serve something green.

Late-stage buyer journey offers are the item that always produces the most leads and almost always gets missed when clients run programs on their own.

These offers are the most important part of our content strategy. These offers are what the sales team will deliver when someone wants to talk to you, so how you write, design, position and execute on them is critical.

To be straight, these are going to replace your Request A Demo, Schedule A Call, Contact Us, Get A Quote and Speak With A Rep offers. No one wants any of these (even the demo).

For more details on creating late-stage buyer journey offers that drive revenue, check out this article.

The Rolls – Lead Scoring

I don’t know about you, but I’m always in favor of as many starchy side dishes as possible. Mashed potatoes? Yes, please! Hash brown potatoes? Yes, please! Cheesy potatoes? Yes, please! So when it comes to rolls and bread at Thanksgiving, I’m ready for those, too.

Dinner rolls, crescent rolls, biscuits and crusty bread? Yes, please! Lead scoring is similar in our eyes.

The better your model, the more models you run and the more complex your models, the higher your scores and the more you can do with those scores. In the end, this drives efficiency in your marketing and in your sales execution as well.

While most people look at onsite behavior and collected data to drive their lead-scoring models, we like offsite behavior, too. In other words, intent data. The combination of onsite and offsite behavior gives your lead-scoring model an even more dynamic number and provides added insight into how you use the number.

Once you know what your prospects are doing offsite and onsite, plus a little bit about who these people are, you can make some good decisions, starting with how to respond.

Do you enter them in a more aggressive lead nurture campaign? Do you signal a rep to pick up the phone and call them? Should the rep send them an email? All of these actions might be appropriate for someone with a very high lead score.

Striking when the prospect is hot helps you to leverage their behavior and match it with an equally proactive response from your sales team. If the data is good, you have an opportunity to turn a prospect into a sales opportunity in minutes instead of days or weeks.

The Dessert – Customer Campaigns And Sales Process Upgrades

I love desserts. The more, the merrier. At our house there are as many desserts as people at dinner. But in the case of your recipe for revenue generation, let’s focus on two of the best desserts, which are customer campaigns and sales process upgrades.

Marketing to customers is often subverted when you start talking about revenue generation. Revenue is almost always from new customers, new logos and new projects when in fact the best place to look for new revenue is your current customers.

They already know you, like you and trust you. They’re already buying from you and hopefully having a great experience. But how many of your customers purchase everything you offer? Probably not many.

While you’re designing your prospect campaigns in 2021, spend some time designing monthly customer campaigns, too. Make them about your customers, not about you. Don’t talk about products or services but rather about the business outcomes your customers have derived from your products or services.

Simply sharing these stories will encourage current customers to ask about how they can get some of that value as well.

Sales process upgrades are the second dessert. If your customer campaigns are your apple or pumpkin pie, then the sales process upgrades are the chocolate.

Look for places in the sales process where momentum slows, stops or gets bumpy. Do you have a place where prospects go dark? Do you have a place where prospects take longer than you expect to give you direction or agree to move forward? Is your close rate lower than 50%?

Identify those areas and work to fix them, remove friction, smooth out the process and supplement the experience with additional educational content. Test these upgrades with a few opportunities and see how it works. If you find success, roll it out to everyone on the sales team.