What‘s Wrong With Revenue?

Episode 47 – You’re Not Using Account-Based Marketing Correctly

Account-based marketing is one of the hottest tactics being discussed today. But we still see companies who don’t understand it, don’t know how to deploy it, don’t know how to measure it, and think it’s a quick solution to a lack of sales opportunities. Instead, executing ABM correctly means you need a very clear set of target companies, an excellent database with current and accurate contact information, highly personalized and targeted content, social media messages, and a tight alignment between sales and marketing. Even with that, you should expect this to be a long-term tactic that might take 30 to 60 days before you start seeing any type of return.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to go about creating a list of top tier targets, second tier targets, and even a tertiary tier of target accounts
• How the ABM campaign execution is different at each level
• Why you need personal campaign content targeted to the individual contacts
• Why social media outreach is mandatory to get new contacts to be engaged with your content
• Don’t try ABM without tight alignment between sales and marketing

Episode 46 – Your Content Strategy Isn’t Connected To Your Prospect’s Buyer Journey (search, landing pages, pillar pages, offers)

Today, people making B2B, complex purchase decisions around high ticket averages execute a buyer journey that is long, highly influenced, multi-stage and non-linear. That’s why we created the Cyclonic Buyer Journey to help companies understand each of the stages in today’s buyer journey. To support this new, highly complex, highly influenced buyer journey, your content needs to be perfectly aligned with your prospect’s buyer journey. At each stage of the journey, you need to know what questions prospects are asking, what issues they have, what education they need, and what exactly it takes to get them to feel safe selecting your company over all the other options.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to understand the new Cyclonic Buyer Journey
• How to craft content and strategically design that content to deliver a remarkable experience
• How to leverage content in marketing, sales, and customer service so that it drives new revenue
• What types of content are getting the best results today?
• How to deploy different types of content at different stages of the buyer journey?

Episode 45 – You Don’t Have A Marketing Operations Function

For most companies, more is always better. More campaigns, more calls, more emails, more social ads, more remarketing, search ads, and more calls to action. But our research shows that it's almost always better to do less targeted and highly optimized campaigns than simply doing more for the sake of doing more. This means your Marketing Operations team isn’t following an optimization framework to make your current ads and your current campaigns work better. This concept of cycling is very important. The more and the faster you cycle, the more optimization you get in and the faster your campaigns get to their optimized performance. You need this optimization phase to get campaigns dialed in.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• What skill sets are needed for your marketing operations team
• When to outsource to an agency vs. handling it inhouse
• What tools are needed for faster cycling and better optimization
• Who should be responsible for these ongoing optimizations?
• How frequently does cycling need to take place to drive program optimization?

Episode 44 – You Can’t Uncover Insights Buried In Your Marketing, Sales, And Customer Service Data

Almost every company has reports and most companies have dashboards or scorecards they use to keep track of their performance in the areas of marketing, sales, and customer service. Some companies even have detailed dashboards for more specific operational performance tracking but did you know that reports, dashboards, and scorecards will only get you 50% of the way there. More important to this analytical picture is the ability to pull out insights from this data and use these insights to inform your action plan. Today very few companies are able to uncover insights buried in their data so their marketing, sales, and customer service execution doesn’t improve fast enough and, in most cases, doesn’t improve at all.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• Whose responsibility it is to review the data and uncover these insights
• What skill sets and experience are necessary to uncover these insights
• What you should be doing with these insights after they’ve been uncovered
• How often should this process of data analysis and insight discovery be run at your company?
• What tools and technology are necessary to make this process manageable?

Episode 43 – You Don’t Have The Right Campaign Methodology

Very few agencies or in-house teams spend much time creating a campaign methodology or creating a campaign team to drive campaign results. But Square 2 does, so we know how to generate results with our campaign execution. You need a very specific methodology and framework but more importantly, you need a set of people who have deep and expansive experience planning, building, running, analyzing, and optimizing ongoing campaigns for success. People also have the wrong timing around expectations for campaign results. It’s 30 days, but the performance data shifts month over month as the campaign optimization focus also changes from early indicators like visitors to leads and conversions. Knowing how to plan out ongoing campaign execution that spans months is key.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to teach your team campaign methodology
• We’ll show you the Square 2 Campaign Methodology
• What results to expect during each stage of the campaign
• What investment levels are commensurate with expectations
• What optimization cycles are and how to use them to generate better results

Episode 42 – You Don’t Have The Foundational Pieces For Scalable Growth

Most people blame sales for slow or no revenue growth. Other people blame marketing for not being able to generate enough leads for sales but it's rarely one department's problem when growth slows when we look at a company's “go-to-market” it's almost always more strategic an issue than first thought. Most companies are missing an emotional, compelling and differentiated story. They might not be going after the right target or not positioning their product/service correctly. Usually, they’re missing the right educational materials to help prospects feel safe and almost always have very little understanding of their own prospect’s buyer journey. These are all foundational pieces for growth to be realized and they’re missing from most companies.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• What are all the foundational elements necessary for growth
• How to know if your company has these in good working order or not
• What to do if you notice some of these elements might be missing
• What the impact will be when you add these missing elements
• What skillsets and experiences are necessary to add these to your company if they are, in fact, missing?

Episode 41 – You’re Not Looking At Technology As An Enabler And A Growth Multiplier

Most people purchase a CRM for the sales team, marketing automation for their marketing department and service software for the customer service team. Instead consider looking for a revenue generation platform that comes with all three pieces already integrated out of the box. Consider looking for a platform that is designed to help your company grow revenue instead of solving a specific departmental challenge. This new perspective is going to change the way you look at your company and the technology that supports it.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to make sure you realize your growth goals after purchasing software designed to help you grow.
• How to get cross departmental buy-in on a different approach to your tech stack.
• Specifically, how marketing, sales and customer service need to work together on a single platform.
• What options you have for platforms like we’re describing during the show.
• What challenges typically present when companies are making this change

Episode 40 – Your (New) Website Already Needs An Upgrade

You built your new website a little over a year ago. Who would ever consider that it might need a refresh, upgrade or major overhaul already? But it does need one. With all the changes Google has made to its search algorithm, with all the new tools available for website management and with the new learnings around visitor experience even websites that are a few months old—are undergoing major updates. Page load speed, conversion optimization, interactive elements and performance on mobile are likely impacting your site's ability to rank, be visible to prospects and turn prospects into leads. You should be working on your website every single month, not every few years. In this episode, we’ll break down what’s driving these changes and how you need to respond to them.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to dig into your website analytics and uncover the performance impacting issues
• How to stay on top of the changes and create a Growth Driven Design approach to your site
• What might be required to fix up your current site so its optimized for today’s environment
• What level of budget should you be considering for these website upgrades?
• How to decide what resources are needed, skill sets and experiences to get the best results.

Episode 39 – You Never Prioritized Your Database As An Important Corporate Asset

Many companies don’t recognize their own databases as important corporate assets. But they are. Your customer database but also your prospect database are critical to your success and if these databases are clean, accurate, regularly maintained and properly segmented you are going to get better results from all your investments in marketing than if they are a hot mess. Unfortunately, many companies have bad data, inaccurate data, old data, old lists, purchased lists, little or no segmentation and incomplete records. This is turning one of your most important assets into an unusable component that should be supporting marketing, sales and fueling revenue growth. In this show, we’ll coach you on how to fix your database but more importantly, prevent it from ever getting in poor condition like this.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to evaluate your current database and assess its actual condition
• How to put someone in charge of keeping your database clean and accurate
• How to go about cleaning it up if it is a mess
• How to monitor it to make sure if there are issues, they are caught early and corrected
• Why everyone in the company must know the company’s goals and how they’re work contributes to those goals

Episode 38 – You Haven’t Created The Right Experience For Your Prospects and Customers

Today, the experience you create for your prospects and clients for that matter is everything. People are judging you based on that experience. They are deciding whether to hire you or not based on that experience and they’re deciding whether to refer you or not based on that experience too. If your growth is challenged, there is a very good correlation to a mediocre or even poor experience before, during, and after prospects work with sales. This means they’re not having a good experience on your website or with your educational content. Sales are giving them an average, at the best experience and after they become a customer, well the mediocrity continues. This is a fast track to a mediocre business and flat or downward growth. In this show, we’ll show you how exactly to ramp up that experience so it’s remarkable.

 What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to map out your prospect and customer buyer journey
• How to identify ALL the touch points starting with marketing and running through sales and customer service
• How to upgrade even the smallest touchpoints with little WOWs that create an experience people talk about
• How this leads to better lead gen, more sales opportunities, many more referrals, and repeat business
• Why this needs to be thought through and connected to overall marketing strategy upfront.