What‘s Wrong With Revenue?

Episode 57 – You Need A Budget And Agreed On Investment Expectations To Drive Revenue

You would never run your business without a budget so you shouldn’t run revenue without one either. You need to set your level of investment based on your growth goals and the plans you have for attaining those goals. What conferences, what website upgrades, what technology, what paid social, paid search, content creating and more needs to get done to produce a certain level of performance. All those questions need to be asked and answered now during your planning cycles for 2023. You should never have to answer the question, “what is your budget for this project?” with “we don’t have one or I don’t know.” You MUST have one and you should manage to it. We’ll help you get this done for 2023 during the show.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to back into the budget number based on your actual growth goals
• How to attribute budget to specific programs so you can build your budget number
• Ways to evaluate the return on your investment during the year so next year’s budget setting process should be much easier
• How to look at the budget across marketing, sales, and customer service as it relates to revenue growth and spending in each area
• What to do if you’ve underestimated or overestimated mid-year

Episode 56 – It’s Planning Season And You Need A New Plan To Hit Revenue Goals in 2023

Creating a plan for revenue growth is an important task for most companies. Yet this generally gets left to the marketing team to come up with a plan of attack. The sales team generally plans for number of salespeople as does the customer service team. There is no integrated, orchestrated revenue plan created at most of the companies we’ve worked with over the past 20 years. Instead, we’re talking about identifying company growth goals and then reverse engineering a plan that backs into exactly what’s needed across all three areas to deliver on those growth goals. Including marketing expenditures, sales upgrades, customer service upgrades, and looking at the flow-through of net new contacts introduced to the company all the way to new customers acquired and the average revenue for each new customer. It’s the only way to ensure you are aligned around goals and execution before the year starts.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• A specific methodology for backing into metrics based on growth goals
• Setting realistic growth goals based on past performance and expected investment levels
• Building out a revenue generation plan that aligns with goals and investment
• Keeping that plan agile to quickly make midyear adjustments based on data
• Installing methodology to make sure that the execution is efficient and matches your plan

Episode 55 – You Need A System To Drive Consistent Revenue Growth

Systems are everywhere in business. Some of the best-run businesses lean heavily on systems and processes to help them scale and grow. Revenue is no different, but hardly any companies look at revenue and think systems. However, if you want to grow your business and scale it up quickly, systems are exactly what you should be looking for. Systems for marketing, systems for sales, and systems for customer service. Better yet, a system for the entire revenue generation effort is going to put your company in the best possible position to drive month-over-month, repeatable, scalable, and predictable revenue growth.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• What a revenue generation system looks like
• What’s required to build one for your business
• Who in the company would need to be part of that process
• The long-term value of having a revenue generation system
• The pluses and minuses of doing this yourself or using an existing system

Episode 54 – You’re Not Leveraging Audio And Video Content To Drive Leads

The world might have changed right in front of your eyes. TikTok, Instagram Reels, YouTube, and not to mention the explosion of audio content like podcasts. This might seem like an issue for B2C brands or people who market to teenagers but it's not. Audio and video content is here to stay, and it needs to be a major part of your marketing and sales strategy. The people you’re trying to attract to your business are consuming massive amounts of video and audio content along their buyer journey. In fact, data shows they prefer printed or written content. Now it’s time to start including more audio and video content in your marketing, sales, and customer service execution. In today’s show, we’ll talk about exactly how to do that.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to know what video and audio content you might need in your revenue generation efforts
• What creative ideas you could consider when creating this type of content and differentiate your business
• Why it's easier than ever to shoot, edit, and produce this type of content
• The marketing applications might be more obvious, but sales and customer service need similar types of content
• How to leverage thought leadership and market position in this type of content
• Where and how to deploy the audio and video content after its produced

Episode 53 – How You Might Have The Wrong Strategy For Events And Conferences

Trade shows, conferences, and events are back and back big. But do you know how to optimize your participation in these events? It’s very likely that you’re showing up but wasting a lot of potential opportunities to generate leads, move sales opportunities along and close new customer business. We’ll discuss a variety of event-related tactics that will definitely improve your ROI on the large event investment associated with most conferences and trade shows. There are a number of tricks and techniques that help you attract the right people and repel the wrong people. We’ll also cover how to optimize the follow-up, so no lead gets left behind.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to create an event plan before you leave for the event and then how to make sure you execute that plan during the event
• Why less, but more qualified leads, are better than a ton of business card non-leads
• How to use your marketing automation platform to automate everything associated with nurturing leads from your events
• Why speaking at events MUST be part of your event strategy
• What in-show promotions work the best to generate real sales opportunities

Episode 52 – Why Your Sales Process Needs To Create A More Remarkable Experience

Your sales process is everything. If you’re a B2B company selling large ticket products or services, if you have a long sales cycle, and if your sale is complex, then you need a killer sales process. It can make or break your company. The experience your prospects have with you and your sales team during your sales process is going to create emotions, relationships, and memories that will influence and, in some cases, even dictate whether you win or lose the deal.

In this episode, we’ll cover the following –

• How to use the prospect’s buyer journey to create a remarkable sales process
• How content plays a major role in creating this remarkable sales process
• How technology is mandatory to ensure everyone is taking the same actions at the same time during the process
• How to track and measure the success of your sales process
• How to continually improve your sales process based on data and feedback

Episode 51 – A Look Back At Our Show, Content, And What Content Will Engage Your Audience in 2023

At Square 2, we’ve always been very transparent with what we’re doing and why. We’re happy to share our wins and our losses. Today, content looks nothing like what it looked like even two or three years ago.

The show is a great example. We used to blog every single day, but when blogging stopped being as effective and audio and video content started to take off, we pivoted and started running LIVECast, video, and podcast shows.

This is our third iteration of audio and video content creation. Today, we’ll go behind the scenes at Square 2 and talk about what went into creating the show, how it evolved from the other three shows, and what we’re looking forward to over the next 12 months.

During the show, we’ll cover –

• Why a show like this produce content in a format that people want to consume
• The scalability of the show and what goes into it
• What we’re planning for this type of content going forward
• The future of content, communities, and producing thought leadership content that drives the important key metrics
• How to come up with your own content programming

Episode 50 — A Recap of Inbound 22

Join Mike and Channel Account Manager Nathan Singer from HubSpot in a post-Inbound 22 debrief. Our interview digs deep into the new HubSpot features released at Inbound 22. We talk about the changing landscape associated with growth and growing companies. The conversation with Nathan is enlightening, exciting, and very educational. This episode caps our Inbound 22 coverage.

Episode 49 — Inbound 22 Edition

Join Mike and Eric at Inbound 22 where we chat with Guillaume Delloue, Channel Account Manager at HubSpot. Our interview digs deep into the new HubSpot features released at Inbound 22. We talk about the changing landscape associated with growth and growing companies. The conversation with Guillaume is enlightening, exciting, and very educational. Filmed live on the Inbound 22 floor, this episode is a special one. 

Episode 48 – You’re Not Leveraging Partners As Part Of Your Growth Strategy

One of the best ways to generate leads quickly is to work with partners. However, this tactic brings its own share of challenges. First, you need to find non-competitive companies that either have your perfect customer as clients or who are marketing to the same audience as your company. Next, you need to make sure they can support any joint marketing campaigns and effectively execute the joint marketing campaigns as well as you do. But once you find the right partners, regular joint marketing activities can be very effective

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to select potential partners to do joint marketing with
• What types of joint marketing tactics should be considered and why?
• What to expect when you work with partners on marketing initiatives
• How to equip your partners with marketing materials to ensure your program is successful
• Some examples of successful partner marketing initiatives