What‘s Wrong With Revenue?

Episode 37 – You Don’t Have The Right Set Of Outside Experts

This might seem self-serving, but it’s not. Square 2 uses a number of outside experts to help us with finance, legal, acquisitions, and even some content production that is outside our wheelhouse. Why do companies lean into expert advice for legal and finance but resist the same move when it comes to marketing, sales, technology, or strategic support. If you’re not growing you might need to rethink who you bring in from the outside to help you grow. Growth expertise can come from a variety of places and in this show, we’ll unpack as many of those options as possible.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to know what outside advice you need to help you grow
• How to assess whether you need a sole practitioner from your industry or an agency with a wide variety of industry expertise
• How to know what outside expertise costs and how much to invest in it
• How to work with outside experts, there are actually a number of models that all work well
• How long do you work with experts, shouldn’t this expertise eventually be brought in-house? Not always.

Episode 36 – Your Marketing And Sales Materials Are All About You

When you go to a cocktail party and you meet someone new, but all they do is talk about themselves, how do you feel? Exactly! That’s what you’re doing when your marketing and sales communications are all about you. Everything you do in marketing and sales should be about your prospects, not about you. Your website should be about how you help people. Your sales stories should be about what you did for other people and how you can do the same thing for every prospect. While you have to mention your name sometimes, your copy should be 80% about your prospects and just 20% about you. Take a look at your website, how many times do you use the words we, us, our, or your company name? How many times do you use the words you and your? It’s a great way to see far off your own marketing might be. Don’t be that guy at the party.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• We’ll talk about why this is so important
• We’ll cover some techniques that you can use to make sure this doesn’t happen or fix it quickly
• This comes up in more places than you think, we’ll uncover all the places this needs your attention
• We’ll talk about applying this in marketing and sales material
• How changing this impacts results

Episode 35 – Your Approach Is Not Agile

The 12-month marketing plan should be dead and buried. The last time we did a plan like this was in 2015. Planning for more than two or three months out is a waste of time. Instead, consider learning how to run your revenue generation efforts with the Agile Methodology. This requires a very specific set of rituals and practices but takes its cue from the software development space where client feedback and data dictate future versions. In this case, data would dictate short and mid-term planning so that you’re always responding and taking action based on actual performance and not opinions. This is going to produce a significant lift in terms of results, but it takes a lot of practice and discipline.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• Being agile does not mean being flexible, using Agile is a very specific set of processes and we’ll go into them during the show
• We’ll cover the rhythms associated with running an Agile revenue generation effort
• We’ll cover the rituals that make Agile work for marketing and sales
• We’ll talk about the roles you need and the timing around moving to an Agile approach
• We’ll cover the improvement in results you should expect from using this methodology

Episode 34 – You’re Not Designing Campaigns Properly

Over the years, the ideas of campaigns come up very frequently with prospects and clients. Everyone wants to do them. Hardly anyone knows how to design them. A set of paid ads on Instagram is a campaign, but it’s not a multi-channel or omnichannel campaign. Understanding what we mean by campaigns is important. You can send a single email out and consider it a campaign. However, this isn’t going to produce significant results. Campaigns need to be designed to carry a similar message or story across multiple vehicles like your website, email, paid, influencers, partners, search, social, and others. When you have all of these vehicles working together with the same story, offers, and creative—that’s an omnichannel campaign. We’ll talk about this in detail during the show.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to create campaign messaging that connects to your overall company positioning
• How to select and execute using multiple tactics or channels
• How to connect the different channel offers and or creative to create a consistent campaign
• How to track the success of the campaign
• How long to run the campaign, this is big, we see people running them too long or too short.

Episode 33 – Your Reps Aren’t Guiding Your Prospects

It's irrefutable, people don’t want to be sold to. We all have created defense mechanisms to repel salespeople. These mechanisms are ingrained into our reptilian brain. The same system that controls fight or flight, pushes salespeople away. “I’m just browsing,” is the most common mechanism, but many of us get physically ill when we think we’re being sold to. Yet, so many companies still run sales processes and hire sales reps to convince people to buy, to use pressure tactics, and push people to take action.  

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to help your reps understand the difference between convincing and guiding
• What it means to be a Sales Guide
• What does a Guided Sales Process look like?
• How to better understand what it means to help prospects “feel safe.”
• How to use supporting tools and content to create a remarkable sales experience

Episode 32 – Your Website’s Technical SEO Is Hurting Your Lead Gen Efforts

A lot of companies have seen organic visitors declining over the past six months. This means fewer people are finding your site when they search and this also means fewer leads from people searching for products and services like yours. But why? What’s causing this? Frankly, there are a lot of reasons for declining organic visitors. Google regularly changes its algorithms and you have to keep up. Your website degrades over time producing a less than stellar experience and Google notices it. If you haven’t created a website that’s designed for your visitors, your site isn’t signaling to Google its true value. Bottom line, there is a lot that can be wrong with your site and your technical SEO efforts. We’ll break this all down and talk about how you can fix it.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to know how your site is doing from a technical SEO perspective
• How to prioritize fixes to make improvements quickly
• How to keep tabs on your site, over time, so you have fewer issues less frequently
• How to stay up to date on the changes Google is making
• How to keep your visitors in mind when you make changes or addition to your current site.

Episode 31 – You’re Making Small Changes When You Should Blow It Up

Change is hard and big change is even harder. But if you’re not hitting your revenue goals, it might be time to blow up everything you’re doing and try an entirely new set of tactics. The world is changing and it's already changed dramatically, it's very possible that what got you to your current revenue levels won’t get you to your new revenue levels. Digital transformation is remaking businesses in every industry. If you’re still using old-school tactics for marketing and sales, regardless of how they used to work or how comfortable you are with them, it might be time to rethink the entire effort. Sometimes, ripping off the band-aid is exactly the right solution.  

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to evaluate if big change is needed
• Where to look and what options are available if you want to rethink your entire go to market
• Examples of other companies who took the big step
• What’s involved and how long it might take to execute an entire digital transformation effort
• Who needs to lead this and what outside resources might make this easier?

Episode 30 – You Don’t Have The Right People In The Right Roles

Today’s marketing and sales execution have everything to do with whether you hit your revenue goals or not. But businesses still put people in the wrong roles, for the wrong reasons. From a marketing perspective, this happens all the time. People are put into marketing because no one else wants to do it or no one else has the expertise. How many people have marketing people who also handle admin for the company? That can’t be in 2022. You need professional marketers, technical marketers, and strategic marketers to drive revenue. This happens in sales too. Almost every sales organization has poor performers at the bottom of the rankings. Eighty percent of new sales still come from 20% of the reps. You need professional sales guides, people who understand the new buyer behavior, and people who are willing to work differently with prospects. If you don’t have the right people in the right roles, you won’t hit your revenue goals

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to get the right people in the right roles
• How to evaluate your current people and make difficult decisions
• How to use “scaffolding” to support your company until you get the right people in the right roles
• Hiring “in house” vs. using outside agencies to support your lack of expertise
• Helping people grow professionally so they can move into new roles

Episode 29 – Demand Generation vs. Inbound Marketing

For years, there has been a battle, demand generation vs. inbound marketing. One is to get your name out there, generate awareness and let the people come back when they’re ready and the other is earning attention for your business so you’re there when people start looking. Both are solid marketing approaches and both can live together in your company’s marketing strategy. But demand generation has an entirely different set of metrics and expectations. Inbound has its own set of metrics and expectations. One is more reactive, the other proactive. We’ll cover both and discuss how to figure out which is right for you. Maybe they both need a place in your approach to growth.  

What we’ll cover in the show –

• What is demand generation? What specific tactics fall into this methodology?
• What is inbound marketing? What specific tactics fall into this methodology?
• When to use them? When not to use them?
• How to understand expectations around performance for both?
• Why has inbound gone through a downturn over the last five years?

Episode 28 – You’re Not Setting Goals Correctly

Most companies leave the high-level goal setting to the CEO or leadership team. In most cases, those are driven by outside sources like investors, boards, or ego. We did $20M last year, we should definitely be able to do $25 this year or our competitor did $50M, so we should be able to at least $40M. But the reality is, these goals have nothing to do with outside influences and everything to do with internal factors like budget, resources, capabilities, and people. Learn how to back into realistic and attainable goals based on actual performance and resources available. Then learn how to increase those variables in order to hit your expected goals.

What we’ll cover in the show –

• How to stop guessing at goals and objectives
• How to align investment to goals and objectives
• How to use real performance data to set your goals and then adjust them based on that data
• Why you should never answer the question, “what is your marketing budget?” with “I don’t know.”
• Why everyone in the company must know the company’s goals and how their work contributes to those goals