Revolutionise Your Tech Business To Experience 3-5X Revenue Growth in The Next 36 Months

Written By Leeroy Powell From MarGen (Include Hyperlinks)

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Preface

“We entrepreneurs are loners, vagabonds, troublemakers. Success is simply a matter of finding and surrounding ourselves with those open-minded and clever souls who can take our insanity and put it to good use.” 

-Anita Roddick

Regardless of where you are in your business journey, there are one or two key players in the industry that are likely outselling all of you. And whilst they have had time to build up their brand, regardless of what they do now, they can sit reasonably comfortably whilst chucking huge budgets at growth – which facilitates them to sit seemingly effortlessly at the top of the chain.

John Stankey – The Chief Executive Officer at AT&T – wrote recently, “A key factor of navigating the current business landscape is wielding influence by inspiring those around you, regardless of reporting structures. Agility comes from having strong leaders at all levels of the organisation and acting boldly.”

The reality is that most companies in the technology sector suck at:

1. Developing strong leadership at every level in the business
2. Marketing effectively – let alone using advanced methods
3. Generating Demand
4. Being influential
5. Sales
6. Utilise current software stacks for generating revenue
7. Accurately predict pipeline
8. Build strong relationships with significant clients

You aren’t alone!

This paper aims to outline precisely how technology businesses like yours can grow exponentially over the next 36 months regardless of a recession, interest rates or economic breakdown. I aim to give you the entire blueprint we use with all our clients to scale their business by 3X within that time.

Below there are just some of the companies that we have secured deals with for our clients. This is why they utilise MarGen as their Growth Partner:

Some of the reviews we have had:

There is a reason why I have in my network many of the CEOs for some of the largest tech companies in the UK, UAE, Europe & USA. There is also evidence that I know what I’m talking about by having one of the fastest-growing newsletters on business, growth and leadership (sign up HERE if interested – it’s free)

This is me (👇). With over 11K followers on LinkedIn alone (+ over 6K on Twitter) and on track to become one of the top ‘influencers’ on the platform from the UK – ranking alongside the likes of Rishi Sunack & Steven Bartlett with my content ranking just shy of 4M views.

I don’t say this to brag – it’s important that you understand I am talking from a position of understanding and authority in my field.

But this isn’t about me. It’s about you and your business:

• Where it is currently (revenue)
• Weaknesses within your team’s ability to generate demand and close at scale
• What can be done to grow the business by 3X in the next 12-36 months

Whilst most tech companies suck at marketing, sales and generating demand, there are specific abilities that allow you to deliver exceptional products and services truly – this is where you are exceptional at what you do and given that I have sent this to you directly – I’m talking to you specifically. Your service and ability to deliver make you and your team unique.

I am here to be brutally honest with you and propose a different approach to generating demand and closing new deals so that we can either scale your business together – or you simply utilise this playbook internally and onboard the right talent to implement what is outlined throughout this paper.

Who Is This For?

So whilst this paper isn’t being posted online, if you have acquired this from someone in your network, it’s essential to understand who this is aimed at exactly. We are very picky regarding who we work with – this includes where you are financially, your abilities and also the mindset and goals for you and your business.

If you are a tech-based company with over 50 staff and have hit around the £5M revenue mark, what I will cover throughout this paper will dramatically increase your revenue over the next 3 years.

It will also define your relationships with customers (new and old) and how your business is perceived within the market so that you can generate incredible demand for your business and scale into new geographical territories. 

In the wake of 2023, many founders have become concerned about where the market is heading and what growth looks like for them both short and long-term. Interest rates, discussions around recessions and layoffs on a global scale are all but prevalent when you delve deep. 

This not only slows down growth for many companies but also means that your bigger customers pull back on their spending and reduce your pipeline unexpectedly. 

Can you relate to what I am saying?

Here’s a thought exercise for you: What has been the underlying tone of your board meetings over the last 3 months?

I do not doubt that it has been bleaker than it was back in 2022 despite there being a current ‘pandemic’ going on at the time.

Trust me when I say that you aren’t alone. The trouble here is that many of those in the industry are running around frantically with no clear plan for turning it around, throwing stuff at the wall in the hopes that it sticks. 

Those at the top of the chain deploy various tactics that ultimately scale their businesses throughout difficult periods.

This is where you can choose to act differently and deploy a series of solutions that – whilst not new – companies like yours either ignore or deploy badly – means much effort is put in to generate demand but ultimately… falls flat on its arse when it comes to driving new revenue opportunities.

Sound familiar by any chance?

OK, so let me ask you this… 

In an ideal world where anything is possible, where would you like to be in the next ten years?

You may want to grow to be a phenomenal company that is globally recognised.

You may want a business with an incredible culture whereby everyone wants to work for you.

You may wish for your business to be in the top 100 companies in the UK.

Some of my clients simply have a huge ego, which is their drive to scale their business.

Some simply don’t allow failure to become an option.

Or, you simply want to grow the business to exit in 10 years with an incredible retirement nest.

Everyone’s reason for growth is different; however, most technology markets have one thing in common…

They suck at generating actual demand and converting inbound at scale!

Whilst they grow year on year, there is always an underlying pressure as NET profit is tight and teams are stressed.

Everyone within the business is overworked.

Am I resonating at all here?

Good! This means there is an opportunity to do things differently and create the foundations to grow the business and scale into new territories. One ethos we go by is this: 

“In Order To Be Exceptional, You Have To Do Exceptional Things”

I’m not just talking about delivery but also positioning at every level of your business to ensure it becomes the industry’s go-to. To do this, you need to plan intentionally and execute at such a level that everyone sees you at the top of the industry.

Whilst it’s not easy, there is a playbook to ensure it happens. My gift to you is this definitive guide, and I hope it serves you well enough to where you feel compelled to implement the strategies I outline here on in so that we can get you and your team to where it deserves to be.

Sounds like a good plan? Excellent. Let’s dive in!

Current Situation

When we begin working with our clients, they tell me they have tried everything to scale up revenue.

Marketing emails that have no responses.

Cold outreach is where clients tell your sales team politely to go away or, even worse, to simply “Fuck Off”.

Spent thousands on ad-spend that have given little to no return. Certainly not produced a profit, at least and worked with marketing companies that never delivered on their false promises. 

They created white papers that no one has viewed.

Put out content that gets ‘liked’ by only those who work for you.

Most (if not all) efforts fall on deaf ears and the only thing driving the business (in reality) is word of mouth as your service is exceptional – despite your abilities to shout about it in a way that drives revenue forward.

I’m a firm believer that a business is either growing or failing. It’s binary. There is no in-between. 

Let’s look at inflation over the last 10 years:

Now let’s look at the CPI (Consumer Price Index):

Naturally, they increase over time. Wages, inflation, cost of living, and cost of services and goods have all risen – exponentially – over the last 24 months. 

I put this forward because when you look at your growth over the last few years, even though turnover has increased, and those targets were met. How does it compare in relation to the above two charts?

My point here is that even if your business has grown in terms of turnover, if the growth isn’t above the accurate price index, then the reality is that it has dropped over time and much further than you had initially thought.

When I say you are either growing or failing, this is what I’m talking about. Even if your revenue was the same as last year (just a hypothesis), then you actually dropped when you truly compared it to the markets.

See what I’m getting at here? A little food for thought.

If you aren’t growing (truly)

If you have an inconsistent lead flow

If your business doesn’t truly know how to market or sell (effectively)

If you don’t know how to capture and monetise attention…

It’s imperative that you pay attention as this paper will truly help you switch things up and turn things around.

The economic landscape has changed dramatically over the last 10 years and more so in the last 3. Layoffs are happening left, right and centre. Investors & VCs have completely shifted their plan from growth to profit. 

The crazy thing is that in the last 10 years, it’s been incredibly easy to find new avenues for growth. And whilst recessions are never good, they do serve one good thing and that is this: 

It separates the strong from the rest!

The next 36 months will present opportunities that come only a handful of times in our lifetime.

Who Is This Not For

Before we proceed any further, I want to quickly clarify who this isn’t for and which companies we refuse to engage with…

If you do not have over £200K that can be allocated to resources that will scale your business, we are not a good fit. The strategies laid out within this paper will not be able to be implemented at this scale within the timeframes mentioned. 

Regardless, you are free to utilise this to look at what you can implement internally but unfortunately, you will not have the capital or resources to throw at it in order to implement it effectively. That being said, nothing stops you from implementing it bit by bit over time, and if that’s the case, I hope it serves you and your team well and I wish you absolute success.

I promise you will gain a ton of insight from this paper regardless of whether or not you have the funds to implement what I’m about to outline.

This also isn’t for any business that thinks marketing wastes time. Or, a business with a marketing team that feels they are doing enough – despite their output delivering a negative ROI on yearly spending.

The world is not created equally and in order to grow exponentially, you need to be humble enough to understand that there is always room for improvement – and that there is a possibility that you are way off the mark when it comes to implementing even the most basic of strategies, let alone more advanced or in-depth methodologies.

Now that we’ve separated the two and you understand which camp you are in… let’s dive straight in!

Thesis

If you have a proven track record of delivering a service with a product-market fit, have an LTV (lifetime value) of £25K+ per customer, and have anywhere between 25-250 staff – there is ample opportunity to scale your business by 3-5X in the next 36 months.

Consider the implications on the valuation and opportunity with that kind of growth.

Moreover, once implemented, many of the methods laid out within this paper have either automation or systems in place that will unify the entire workforce and streamline both marketing and sales, meaning once the growth has been achieved, everything is in place to keep moving at a similar trajectory – with the right mindset and ambition of course.

The reality is, most companies (but especially technology companies) use outdated methods when it comes to both sales and marketing. They feel that having something like Salesforce or Hubspot is enough when putting together a few marketing emails and a sporadic white paper on their site.

As I mentioned previously, both marketing and sales have changed dramatically over the last 10 years and moreover in the last 3. Those that see incredible growth have noticed that people’s awareness and how they align their attention is completely different. That’s one point to mention.

Another is that the amount of software that has flooded the market over the last 3 years is incredible. Take that even further with ChatGPT being appropriately released last year, we will see 10 years of software released within the next 18 months – guaranteed.

But if you aren’t looking in the right places and devoting a solid chunk of attention to this (over a substantial period of time), you won’t be able to keep up or know what is good and what is garbage. There are some great products with poor marketing and poor products with astonishing marketing. 

Let me put this to you: Look at your email inbox over the last 3 years. How much more emails do you get?

It’s a lot. I know. I also know why.

An influx of young adults (some even still in school) have made use of software and tools that make ‘personalised’ mass mailing which, in turn, has driven the number of tools for this to be created. 

The demand has fueled the market which in turn has fueled the amount of tools created for the market aided by the speed to which tools like this can be created. 

The same goes for content, website tools, marketing, sales, SEO, conferences, SMS, email, commerce, operations, finance, productivity, customer support, data, coding, lead generation, demand generation, audio, video, CRM, development, productivity… It goes on and on.

The tools have driven the speed at which tools can be created. 

Therefore price and skill requirements have decreased.

Therefore more people buy them.

Which in turn speeds up that cycle.

The point I am getting at here is there are so many options and avenues to explore. 

Those that don’t use them – sure, they will still survive

Those that do, can increase productivity and explore ways to maximise growth potential.

However, as a business that is already overworked… How the fuck do you find time to allocate resources to find which one works best… especially as it takes time to fully explore which methods have a strong possibility to strengthen your business in some way that is positive to your bottom line?

Then, with all the hype going around, more traditional methods become saturated. 

It’s impossible to keep up for most companies. 

We have tried everything. We commit part of our resources to exploring all the trends and working out what holds weight, and what is garbage. 

We also look at habits and psychology and how they are changing as technology develops. 

As technology becomes more autonomous, we are becoming more nonautonomous.

Our business has formed from a training company, a marketing company, a sales outsourcing team and fanatics of trends and software all joining forces to create the perfect solution to grow any company. It just so happens that we enjoy working in the technology sector the most.

The difficulty for you as a business leader, is to accept that change needs to happen to adopt a new approach that will skyrocket your sales. Some people don’t like change, and those people aren’t for us.

Only those humble enough to accept the markets (or, more importantly, people’s habits) have changed, and they need to explore new methods if they wish to propel growth in such a way that they smash the competition.

Our clients onboard us to dramatically change how others see their business as we transform them from surviving to essential market leaders. 

With all the technological advances going wild, looking at the bigger picture is necessary. To do this correctly, we need to be incredibly subjective.

Most of what I have put forward has evolved around technology and psychology around marketing, and sales. 

Yet when was the last time you received a sales letter like this?

Now think about the fact that you are still reading. 

With all my focus within this letter being around tech and how you should use it, it’s also important to go against the grain and do what others are not.

There are more ways to ‘skin a cat’ as they say, and the same goes around garnering attention to your business.

The key component here is this… attention!

Personal brands are taking over traditional methods of marketing in many ways. Solopreneurs are making £1-10M with just a newsletter and daily social media posts on LinkedIn & Twitter. 

YouTubers create wealth by documenting how they do what they do and garner more attention than all the mainstream media outlets combined. 

Podcasters can accumulate downloads greater than a song that has had half a million thrown at it for marketing.

Imagine if just 10% of your workforce held strong personal brands and what that would do for your business?

Also, imagine this and this is a serious proposal to you:

If we could leverage a dramatic increase in your inbound, what will you do with those within your business that are not producing an ROI?

As the business grows dramatically, due to one of the most fundamental laws in science and physics, the Pareto principle will ensure that there is a large percentage of people within your business that is doing the least amount of work.

As a leader, founder or CEO, do you have what it takes to remove any dead weight within your organisation?

There are some tough decisions to be made if we are going to work together.

As you grow, it’s paramount that you can make these tough decisions. 

Not everyone can. This is why we come along to not only implement new strategies for growth but fully analyse productivity throughout and look at who is decreasing your bottom line.

We are not an agency that is brought on to fix a minor problem. We are a partner that becomes part of your business to grow, refine and streamline many areas so that growth not only can be expected but forecasted with great efficiency. 

Background

As I mentioned, my name is Leeroy. When I dropped out of university, I got into the world of sales. I joined one of the largest retailers in IT (Insight) and quickly worked my way up where I focused on selling large corporate solutions to the banking, government and healthcare sector. From there, I took a detour to work with Formula 1 for 5 years which allowed me to network with some of the biggest names in business, government and sport. From there, I set up my first business which focused on B2B marketing and growth. 

My customer base varied from IT, agencies, software, finance, coaching, cybersecurity and many others. Whilst all the customers were from different sectors, the problems were all the same in each of the companies I worked with. 

Worse still, the agencies that I worked with that tried solving some of these solutions were piss-poor and solving them. 

Over time, I started offering different areas to the solution we work on now and as there was a dire need for what we do now, I am proud to say that we hold strong relationships with a good proportion of our first customers that brought us on to solve a linear solution back in our infancy.

The market needed a solution that solved sales, marketing, leadership, and everything. 

A go-to for the leaders in the business, which in effect is a new department within their business that focuses on the following:

1. Unifies the business and improves the mindset of the leaders and teams
2. Streamlines process for growth
3. Implements multi-methods for generating demand
4. Ensures the marketing department is ROI positive
5. Repositions the business as a market leader
6. Develops personal brands at every level of the business
7. Strengthens sales and conversions
8. Delivers in-house training
9. Highlights weaknesses within the business
10. Future-proofs the business and opportunity for growth
11. Becomes essential to the CEO

Foresight & Insight

I touched previously on input and work ethic and how it’s impacting on businesses. One of the big struggles is finding the right talent that outshines the rest at a price that produces a positive return. 

You only need to look at the amount of technology-based businesses that are slashing their workforce. However, many of them aren’t doing it in an effective way. 

One great example of this is Twitter. Regardless of your thoughts surrounding the platform, let’s look at this from a business perspective. They were bought out and within a short amount of time, more than half the workforce were laid off at every level of management. 

Pareto principle was completely removed and those that carried everyone else were rewarded with higher wages and the best talent was further onboarded. This led to the bottom line and productivity being increased with many functions that had been 2-years+ in planning were now deployed at lightning speed. 

Implications

Innovation has always come from the fringe and businesses in every industry are getting lost in a sea of sameness.

Many companies now have the inability to make critical decisions due to over complicated decision committees and micromanagers throughout the businesses. 

Companies should hold leadership at every level and encourage smart decisions to be implemented by everyone within the business. What could be an opportunity is not only missed but never even explored due to too many barriers or chaos within the decision-making process. 

People should be employed for their capabilities to think strategically and as such, should be trusted to initiate new ideas and explore new areas for expansion in their field. Yet many companies remove that completely by implementing a top-down approach where no one is given the space to think and deploy from a strategic and exploratory field that enables new initiatives and ideas to run through every level of the business. 

Your teams are great and the more they are encouraged and nurtured, the more new and exciting realms are incubated.

Otherwise, there is a complete stagnation in strategy, great staff become unappreciated and true growth is capped through poor management and entrapment within departments.

Innovation should come from every level of your business and not from the boardroom.

The irony is that there are kids still living with their parents that bring more attention to the masses than most departments or CEOs could ever imagine. 

The Proof Is In The Pudding

Where we are now is not (obviously) where we started. When we initially started working with our clients, we were brought on board to solve a specific issue of generating new leads for their business. 

The problem was that there are many angles to bring in new leads and in order to convert, you need to be positioned correctly in order to bring on bigger clients to your business. This caused us to become more than a supplier and over time, we became part of their business – implementing all of the things I am outlining in this paper. 

We began seeing what worked and what didn’t along with what were the core problems within all these businesses that were getting in the way of substantial growth both short and long-term.

As relationships were strengthened, we were entrusted with more areas and as such, became integral parts of their business where we were initially brought on to solve a specific task and by the end, we became partners to the point our clients moved from a 3-month onboarding to 12-36 months. What’s more astonishing is that those that we work with end up doing so far beyond these timeframes.

Companies like Integrella are a prime example of this. When we began working together, they had a goal of increasing their revenue by 150% per year. Since then, they have situated us at the heart of their entire business to:

1. Establish their leadership team as thought leaders in the industry
2. Develop a system that attracts inbound enquiries from the majority of Fortune 500 companies
3. Establish the business in other geographies including the Middle East, & the USA
4. Develop internal processes that enable growth with minimal friction
5. Setup systems that automate certain areas of marketing and onboarding
6. Provide avenue whereby the pipeline is consistently growing
7. Where the forecast is extremely reliable and not built from vanity or hope

There is also Lead Forensics who, despite not being in our current range of types of clients we onboard, have become a long-standing partner for business and growth year on year. We continue to develop new channels of business and growth for their inbound team. This means that each month, there are multiple new companies paying anywhere between £50K-£350K per year globally which comes as an extension to their already efficient methods of bringing in new business.

My team knows how to scale up businesses in any sector.  These methods work for all service-based businesses where the LTV of a customer is £25K or more.

It just happens to be that our chosen niche is the technology sector. We chose this due to our experience and preference and our personalities work well with many of the leadership teams within this sector.

We know many of the problems you have and will face and how to overcome them through changes internally, systems to put in place and methods to use to reposition the business quickly so that more customers are onboarded and contract size is increased.

How To Scale Your Business 3-5X In 36 Months Or Less

This is the essence of our offer. Feel free to utilise what’s put forward to onboard internally and grow at your own pace. 

However, if you want to work with a growth partner that can decrease the time it takes to get from A to B in less time and pay based on performance, then book a call with me or my team HERE

The Solution

1. Full Business Analysis
   1. Asses the goals, strengths and weaknesses of the business overall
   2. Understand teams and departments to map out growth internally
   3. Talk with current customers:
      1. Understand them fully
      2. Solidify offer
      3. Find unseen opportunities 
   4. Remove low-impact or non-aligned staff
   5. Develop training roadmap for teams and departments
      1. Sales
      2. Marketing
      3. Personal Branding
      4. Leadership At Every Level training
      5. C-Suite and board mindset and planning exploration
2. Map out growth strategy and assess what is needed to implement the strategies, looking at:
   1. Systems
   2. Software
   3. Training
   4. Onboarding
   5. Nurturing
   6. SOPs
   7. Streamlining
3. Implement:
   1. Marketing roadmap
   2. Lead generation strategies
   3. Demand generation strategies
   4. Nurturing systems and funnels
   5. C-Suite positioning tactics
   6. Business positioning methodologies
   7. Internal systems
   8. Thought leadership development
   9. Customer intelligence 
   10. White Paper roadmap
   11. Paid media advanced strategies
   12. Core and Advanced SEO and link building

When put together, it looks something like this:

The Underpinning Core Of The Leaderships Voice Of Authority

So we have the entire system mapped out to achieve a minimum of 3X growth – although realistically, we are aiming for and have achieved 5X+ in most instances. 

For a system – or plan – to work, there has to be an underpinning ethos or framework that exists so that from the top down, those plans are not only put forward but taken on as ownership throughout the entire company.

This is where we build authority from the top down and channel that publicly in a way that drives traffic, leads and sales.

One of our partners and good friend Oli uses the following model within his entire business which, in the space of 3 years, has allowed him to work with exceptional brands such as Porsche where he was on-boarded to advise how they market their (new at the time) Taycan Electric model.

Here is the model they implement for their customers of Authority Agency:

Most businesses are stuck in chase mode when it comes to finding leads which lead (no pun intended) to leave the business growth mechanisms to be inconsistent 

In the 3-pillars above, we must build on each of these within the first 12 months to where each of them (and the systems to build on them) are pivoted in a way that absolute authority comes into play. 

Without all three working symbiotically, their efforts simply outroot the benefits and stonewall the ability to drive huge growth, especially when we build on the other systems and pillars alongside the 3 core components within and from the C-Suite and beyond.

Let’s look at an example here. Let’s say we have the CEO of a company we are working with and want them to become thought leaders in their space. We began building systems that point all eyes to them. Potential customers go through the channels and are hit with a profile with no value or authority whatsoever.

What do you think the reaction will be? 

Then they look at the company page for the business and the content is lacklustre, fluffy and generic throughout.

They then look at the competition where the company content is pivoted to help the customer before they have had any interaction. The staff are posting content that guides the customer on how to get the best, without ever even pushing for a sale whilst the CEO is positioned from an authoritative approach, with interviews, podcasts, and roundtables from a variety of aspects.

Which one are you going to go with, bearing in mind that when it comes to the solutions or services you are offering, both these businesses within this scenario are almost identical?

Sure, any company can grow without these. However, we are looking for absolute growth that pivots the businesses and achieves phenomenal growth in a much shorter time frame. 

In order for this to happen, changes need to be made, and new systems put into place with training throughout the entire company.

The real question here is, are you ready to make the changes (which won’t be easy) in exchange to pivot the business as the absolute authority within your field?

Most want tangible results without having to do anything different and the reality is, that will never happen.

Real, planned change is heavy implementation is what will put you 10 years ahead of the industry.

Is that what you really want and if so, are you ready to put in the work to make that happen?

Most aren’t and as such, only a few will really stand above the crowd.

Personal Branding

Before I go into why it’s important for the leadership team (and everyone else within the business for that matter) to have a strong personal brand, we need to explore what it is exactly and why having one strongly correlates with long-term positioning and growth.

Personal branding refers to the practice of deliberately shaping and promoting an individual’s reputation, expertise, and unique attributes to create a distinct and recognizable professional identity. It involves strategically managing one’s online and offline presence, including social media profiles, professional networks, public appearances, and thought leadership activities.

There are several reasons why more people are building personal brands:

Increased Visibility: In a digital age where information is readily accessible, personal branding allows individuals to stand out and be noticed amidst the noise. It provides a platform to showcase skills, achievements, and expertise, enabling individuals to reach a broader audience and gain visibility within their industry or area of interest.

Career Advancement: Personal branding can significantly impact career growth and advancement opportunities. By cultivating a strong personal brand, individuals can position themselves as experts or thought leaders in their respective fields. This can lead to increased recognition, networking opportunities, and career progression, whether within an organisation or as an entrepreneur.

Building Trust and Credibility: In a competitive marketplace, establishing trust and credibility is crucial. Personal branding helps individuals create an authentic and consistent professional image, demonstrating their expertise, values, and accomplishments. This builds trust with potential clients, employers, partners, and stakeholders, ultimately opening doors to new opportunities.

Networking and Collaboration: Personal branding facilitates networking and collaboration with like-minded professionals and industry peers. By actively building a personal brand, individuals can expand their professional network, engage in meaningful conversations, and form valuable partnerships. These connections can lead to collaborations, business ventures, and knowledge sharing, fostering personal and professional growth.

Entrepreneurial Ventures: For entrepreneurs and solopreneurs, personal branding is often integral to business success. Building a strong personal brand allows entrepreneurs to differentiate themselves from competitors, establish authority, and attract clients or customers. A compelling personal brand can also serve as a foundation for building and scaling a business, as it creates a loyal following and enhances market positioning.

Adaptability in a Changing Landscape: With evolving workplace dynamics and career paths, personal branding has become essential for adapting to change. It enables individuals to showcase their skills and adaptability, positioning themselves as valuable assets in an ever-changing job market. Personal branding provides individuals with the flexibility to pivot careers, explore new opportunities, or transition into new industries.

Overall, personal branding offers individuals the opportunity to shape their professional identity, increase visibility, and create valuable connections. In a world where reputation and differentiation are vital, more people are recognizing the importance of building a personal brand to achieve their personal and professional goals.

The digital landscape has changed dramatically over the last 10 years and more so in the last 3. Those that are building strong personal brands are solidifying their own and their companies’ success through strong positioning and overall message and engagement. 

The CEO

Having a strong personal brand as a CEO can bring numerous benefits to both the individual and the business as a whole. Here are some of the key advantages:

Building Trust and Credibility: A CEO with a strong personal brand can establish trust and credibility with stakeholders, including employees, customers, investors, and partners. By consistently delivering on promises, displaying expertise, and demonstrating integrity, a CEO can enhance the reputation of both themselves and the company they lead.

Attracting Talent: A CEO with a compelling personal brand can attract top talent to the organisation. Talented individuals are often drawn to working with influential and respected leaders who have a clear vision and a track record of success. A strong personal brand can make a CEO more appealing to potential hires, helping the company recruit and retain exceptional employees.

Amplifying the Company’s Message: A CEO’s personal brand can act as a powerful megaphone for the company’s message. By leveraging their visibility and influence, CEOs can increase the reach and impact of the organisation’s communications. Their personal brand can help amplify key initiatives, promote the company’s values, and differentiate it from competitors.

Driving Business Development: A CEO with a strong personal brand can facilitate business development efforts. Their reputation and network can open doors to strategic partnerships, collaborations, and investment opportunities. Clients and partners may be more inclined to engage with a CEO who is well-known and respected in their industry, leading to potential growth and expansion for the company.

Crisis Management: In times of crisis, a CEO with a strong personal brand can provide stability and reassurance. Their established reputation and credibility can help restore confidence among stakeholders and mitigate reputational damage. A CEO who is perceived as competent, transparent, and trustworthy is more likely to navigate challenging situations effectively, minimising the negative impact on the business.

Thought Leadership and Industry Influence: A CEO with a strong personal brand can establish themselves as a thought leader in their industry. By sharing insights, expertise, and innovative ideas, they can shape industry conversations, influence trends, and position the company as an industry leader. Thought leadership enhances the CEO’s personal brand while elevating the company’s reputation and attracting attention from stakeholders.

Employee Engagement and Motivation: A CEO with a strong personal brand can inspire and motivate employees. When employees see their leader embodying the company’s values, demonstrating expertise, and achieving success, it can foster a sense of pride, loyalty, and purpose within the organisation. This, in turn, can lead to increased employee engagement, productivity, and overall company performance.

It is important to note that while a CEO’s personal brand can bring significant benefits, it should align with and complement the company’s brand and values. The CEO’s personal brand should enhance, not overshadow, the organisation’s overall image and objectives.

Personal Branding Mechanisms Throughout The Entire Business

When the entire team of leaders within a business has strong personal brands, it can have a profound impact on driving revenue and positioning the company as an authoritative narrative. Here are the benefits of having a team of leaders with strong personal brands:

Diversified Thought Leadership: Each leader brings their unique expertise, perspective, and experience to the table. When multiple leaders within the organisation have strong personal brands as thought leaders in their respective domains, it creates a diverse and comprehensive narrative. This enables the business to address a broader range of topics, cater to a wider audience, and establish a reputation for expertise across various areas.

Expanded Network and Partnerships: A team of leaders with strong personal brands increases the collective network and connections of the company. Each leader’s relationships and industry influence can open doors to valuable partnerships, collaborations, and business opportunities. This expanded network can fuel revenue growth, enhance market presence, and facilitate strategic alliances that benefit the overall business.

Amplified Brand Visibility: When multiple leaders within the organisation have strong personal brands, it leads to amplified brand visibility. Each leader’s individual presence and influence can contribute to greater overall exposure for the company. Their personal brand activities, such as speaking engagements, media appearances, and thought leadership content, can attract attention and generate interest in the business as a whole.

Enhanced Reputation and Authority: A team of leaders with strong personal brands collectively elevates the company’s reputation and authority. When each leader is recognised for their expertise and contributions, it builds a perception of a knowledgeable and influential organisation. This reputation attracts customers, partners, and investors who seek to align with authoritative voices in the market, ultimately driving revenue growth.

Increased Employee Morale and Retention: A team of leaders with strong personal brands can inspire and motivate employees at all levels. When employees witness their leaders’ accomplishments, thought leadership, and industry recognition, it instilled a sense of pride and confidence in the organisation. This positive work environment can boost employee morale, productivity, and retention, leading to improved business performance and customer satisfaction.

Competitive Advantage: In today’s competitive business landscape, having a team of leaders with strong personal brands can give a company a significant edge. It sets the organisation apart from competitors and positions it as a trusted and influential entity in the market. Customers and stakeholders are more likely to choose a company with a team of leaders who have established personal brands and are seen as leaders in their respective fields.

By leveraging the combined strength of personal brands across the leadership team, businesses can create a cohesive narrative that resonates with customers, establishes authority, and ultimately drives revenue growth. It is crucial for these personal brands to align with the company’s values, messaging, and objectives to ensure a consistent and impactful brand presence.

Thought Leadership

Being a thought leader means being recognized as an authoritative and influential figure within a particular industry or field. Thought leaders are individuals who possess deep knowledge, expertise, and innovative insights in their respective domains. They actively share their expertise through various channels, such as speaking engagements, published articles, social media, and other thought leadership platforms.

The benefits of being a thought leader for the business and its connection to a strong personal brand are closely intertwined:

Establishing Industry Authority: Thought leaders are seen as experts in their field. By consistently sharing valuable insights, trends, and innovative ideas, they establish themselves and their company as authoritative voices. This enhances the reputation and credibility of both the individual and the business, positioning them as industry leaders.

Building Trust and Influence: Thought leaders engender trust by consistently providing valuable and relevant information. They become trusted sources of knowledge and guidance, and people turn to them for advice and expertise. This trust and influence translate into stronger relationships with customers, partners, and stakeholders, leading to increased business opportunities and customer loyalty.

Driving Business Growth: Thought leadership can directly impact business growth. When a thought leader shares insights and perspectives aligned with the company’s products or services, it can generate interest and attract potential customers. Thought leaders often have a following of engaged and loyal followers who are more likely to support and advocate for the business, leading to increased brand awareness and revenue.

Differentiating from Competitors: In competitive markets, having a thought leader within the organisation sets the business apart from competitors. It creates a unique selling proposition and distinguishes the company from others in the industry. This differentiation enhances the company’s market positioning and increases its chances of attracting customers and partnerships.

Amplifying Personal Brand Impact: Being a thought leader amplifies the impact of a strong personal brand. Thought leadership activities, such as speaking at conferences, contributing to industry publications, or hosting webinars, provide opportunities for personal brand visibility and recognition. Thought leadership reinforces the CEO or leader’s personal brand and, in turn, enhances the reputation and reach of the business.

A strong personal brand is the foundation for becoming a thought leader. It encompasses an individual’s values, expertise, and unique qualities. A personal brand provides the platform and credibility needed to be recognized as a thought leader. On the other hand, thought leadership activities contribute to building and strengthening the personal brand by showcasing expertise, establishing authority, and attracting a dedicated following. The two concepts are intertwined and reinforce each other.

While a personal brand can garner attention, a thought leader’s impact goes beyond personal recognition. Thought leadership benefits the business as a whole by establishing it as an industry leader, driving growth, and enhancing the company’s reputation and influence. Similarly, a strong personal brand without thought leadership may lack substance and fail to provide meaningful insights and value to the audience.

In summary, a strong personal brand sets the stage and thought leadership activities contribute to establishing authority, driving business growth, and differentiating the company. The synergy between a strong personal brand and thought leadership is essential for creating a lasting impact and positioning the business as a leader within the industry.

The Outreach Protocols – Smart Organic Outbound

Let’s look at what most people/businesses do in order to try and drive sales.

They put out sporadic social posts. Someone on the sales team sends a few emails that quite simply bore the reader as it’s all “Me, Me, Me”. That goes straight into the digital trashcan along with the rest of the follow-ups. The salesperson then makes a few calls and then 5 O’clock comes around. 

Rinse and repeat as the company relies on a few recommendations and referrals. 

KPIs are either so low or not even monitored at all.

Over a 5-year period, the company slowly grows, while budgets are tight and mediocre people are on-boarded with only 10% of the team being key performers. 

NOTE: I wrote a piece on this in further detail which you can read here:

Now let’s look at a better way of doing this. One where we can scale with little to no effort and systematise the whole process through correct software, strong copy and the right team to convert.

The reality is, outbound has changed dramatically and those that have made the changes are reaping exceptional rewards.  

How many companies have you seen recently that are in their first few years of infancy yet seeing profits ranging from £10M-£100M+ with such small teams?

‘Big’ companies that have been around for a while are massively behind the curve and incredibly, technology companies are the worst culprits, behind on tech stacks with marketing and capabilities way behind. What’s funny is that there are kids 18-24 that are outshining businesses that have been established for 20 years. 

Despite the technology sector being founded on technology, they are the last to move with the times when it comes to generating revenue and grabbing people’s attention. 

The way that companies run decade-old tactics and expect to compete is simply laughable.

Remember the iconic story of Blockbuster and Netflix? 

Think you are bigger than what is now an old memory of the video rental icon?

No, of course not. 

It happened to them and it can happen to you.

Change and adapt or get left behind, or at the very least, grow at an exceptionally slow rate which, as I pointed out at the beginning of all this, with inflation, you are pretty much staying stagnant. 

Now the pep talk is out of the way, let’s look at how and why others are seeing exceptional growth whilst you struggle to hit 30% and burn out your team and their morale in the process.

The competition for attention in people’s inboxes is fierce. Let’s not beat around the bush. Look at your own: how many do you receive and how many do you respond to?

Practically zero I am sure.

How many emails do you get that are impersonal, with bland claims about solving vague problems on undefined timelines.

Again, what do you do with these… nothing apart from hit DELETE!

Outreach specialists are getting smart, building up advanced systems that once implemented, are able to scale up their efforts and generate a constant supply of leads and interests for their service. 

With IP switching, domain authority warmup systems and AI interacting with a pool of email addresses behind the scenes all help you send and generate more and more leads which, to the onlooker, is personal and drives meetings forward. The unskilled, however, continue to burn both domains and company reputations with generic, unresearched and outright frustrating copy that only pisses off the potential reader.

With AI, Automation tools, and a heavy adoption of fringe tactics, an assistant researcher and VA can put you 5 years ahead of mainstream corporate tactics which, tied in with everything else I’m outlining within this article, we can create a finely-tuned conveyor belt of interest and new business revenue from every untapped resource out there. 

As I said earlier, fortune favours the bold and that is exactly what we are aiming for here. If you are only considering micro-tactics that hold little bearing on creating traction to drive the business forward, then I’m afraid we won’t be able to work together. 

If you are interested in what I’m talking about, take a look at the following graph:

As a company, you need to look at what can be automated, whilst being honest about what can be improved and what needs a complete overhaul. Some things must also be completely rebuilt from the ground up to get the best for you and your team. As I mentioned before, many sales reps and business development teams waste, in reality, around 70% of their day.

This is through no fault of their own. 

In many instances, they know there are more efficient approaches, yet they either lack the knowledge of better implementation systems or are unable to make necessary changes to test new systems through very poor top-down management protocols. 

The aim is to have one person managing everyone’s outreach systems (this can easily be outsourced to a VA offshore – it’s that simple once the system is set up correctly), leaving the sales reps to divide their day in the following:

• Morning: Discovery calls
• Late morning: Warm leads
• Afternoon: Managing current clients (if they are also running their own account management protocols)

The discovery call schedule is managed by the VA, along with Salesforce/Hubspot so that everything is kept up to date, allowing for warm calls to be scheduled as potential clients move up the pipeline.

Look, the reality here is that many of you reading this are paying a decent salary to your business development team, whilst leaving them to do tasks that an offshore representative could do with their eyes closed for £4-£5 per hour.

It’s pure insanity, let’s be honest. 

Stop getting precious around tasks and properly assign them to the relevant paygrade, thus allowing your team to become more effective at warming up prospects and delivering a more efficient ROI.

Discovery Calls

Mastering the discovery call is key to improving the buyer experience.

When a prospect agrees to schedule a discovery call with your sales team, they’re obviously interested in what you’re selling.

Think about that for a moment: Your prospect is bombarded with pointless pitches and useless marketing messages, but for some reason, they’ve decided your company might have what they’re looking for.

A discovery call is more than the first conversation between a sales rep and a prospect. Indeed, it can be a gold-plated opportunity—if you can keep the call from going off the rails.

Why the discovery process is so important to buyer experience

It’s not enough to present your product or service as the solution to prospects’ problems. You have to make a connection to their innermost emotional challenges.     

Today’s buyers have access to an unprecedented volume of information. They’re savvier, and they have more options than ever before. During the sales cycle, the prospect’s tipping point often comes down to how well they feel understood—and how well your solution speaks directly to their needs.

So, make sure your discovery process captures the prospect’s perspective: They get dozens of voicemails and emails every day trying to grab their attention. Most of these messages are worthless because they aren’t relevant to what the prospect needs right now, and you have to make sure your message doesn’t similarly get lost in the shuffle.

Imagine the IT director who’s under fire for an embarrassing breach of customer data. If you’re selling an automated backup solution, you have to frame your discovery call to establish that your technology helps him address the threat of a cyber-attack. Otherwise, you’re doing the prospect no good.

The discovery call is your reps’ first chance to elevate the buyer experience. If they get it right, sales reps will learn the prospect’s core motivations and be able to demonstrate how they can solve the buyer’s most pressing problems.

Tips for mastering the sales discovery call

A robust discovery process includes asking probing questions to uncover the full scope of the prospect’s difficulties. These are some of the best ways to help your sales org master the sales discovery call and optimise the buying experience:

Do your homework

As you coach reps, instruct them to dig deep into the company’s market and figure out their most pressing challenges. They should visit the prospect’s LinkedIn page and look for opportunities to establish a personal connection, like congratulating them on a promotion or mentioning how much you enjoyed visiting their hometown.

Create a framework

Make sure your discovery process has a consistent structure, with bullet points that must be covered in a specific order that’s most friendly to the prospect’s point of view. Create a diagram, such as a conversation tree, to visualise your framework so everybody can understand it quickly and intuitively.

Document, measure, and test

Establish a base methodology to track the success of your discovery calls. Use the base data to establish benchmarks and best practices. Consider A/B testing to tweak your discovery process and improve performance. Many sales teams create scoring systems to help quantify their success rate.

As you optimise your discovery call methodology, always make sure you’re fine-tuning it in ways that create a better buyer experience. Success here depends on the quality of the questions that sales reps ask.

The best sales discovery questions to ask

In sales, you have to avoid your instinct to focus on your need to close. Instead, you want to learn why your prospect is interested in your company—their goals, challenges, and hopes that your solution can help them achieve. A customer-centred approach to the discovery call means asking a lot of questions and listening carefully to everything the prospect says in reply.

As you record and listen to discovery calls for reps to provide feedback, pay attention to the questions they ask—they shouldn’t bother with rookie questions like “What are your pain points?” and “What keeps you up at night?” Remember, prospects are talking to your competitors and expect you to understand why they’ve invited you into their world. It’s not what’s in it for you. It’s what you have for them.

Instead, coach reps ask questions like, “Everybody in your market has the same problem—what if you could do X to solve it?”

Sales discovery questions should stay open-ended and exploratory. Sales reps don’t learn much from a “yes” or “no” reply. A few more examples:

• What’s going right with your current solution, and what’s going wrong?
• What do you think will happen if you do nothing and keep things the way they are?
• What would you like to do if budget were no object?
• Your goal is to create a discovery call framework that asks similar questions of every prospect, so you can optimise your process to improve closing rates.

What to listen for after discovery call questions

Even more important than asking the right questions, sales reps need to listen intently to the answers buyers give in order to understand where they are coming from. The discovery call should reveal:

Where they are now

Sales reps should use conversations with other customers to probe how the prospect deals with common challenges in their marketplace. Reps could say something like, “Folks we’re talking to these days keep running into Problem X. How are you dealing with it?”

Where they want to be

One of the most essential questions is “What will success look like for you?” Reps have to understand the buyer’s target outcome to have any hope of helping them get there.

What unique business challenges do they face

Each company has a distinct combination of clientele, leadership, management, and differentiation in the marketplace. Make sure discovery questions uncover how these qualities create unique problems your company can solve. Reps could ask questions like, “What’s different about your company that requires a unique approach?”

What they need from you

Make sure reps are clear on the specifics of what the buyer needs and what they object to. Your discovery call framework can help establish the most effective responses to their objections.

Who makes the buying decisions

The prospect probably doesn’t have sole purchase authority. Make sure discovery questions reveal the key stakeholders in the buying process.

Don’t overlook the basics: Discovery questions also need to reveal the prospect’s budget, implementation timelines, and expected deliverables.

Building a relationship

Business always comes down to people buying from people. Thus, the discovery call should nurture opportunities to establish a personal bond with the prospect.

Salespeople often feel tempted to jump right into a product demo or a list of key features. That’s putting the cart before the horse. The prospect isn’t ready to buy during the discovery call. Instead, they’re trying to narrow their list of seven providers to two or three.

At this point, sales reps need to start probing the emotions that underscore the prospect’s motivation to work with them. They should ask questions that reveal how the buyer feels about the situation they’re in. Is it anxiety or determination? Do they have an adventurous streak, or are they more cautious?

What do they need from salespeople throughout their buying process? What must you do to accommodate those needs?  

Advise reps to apply a dash of small talk early in the call to establish that they’re an approachable person who’s interested in the prospect’s point of view. But remember that a gift of gab can be a double-edged sword: If they get carried away with the banter, they lose precious time to get on with the business of discovering the prospect’s needs.   

Ultimately, all sales come down to an emotional response called trust. If logic and reason ruled the sales process, every provider could enter all their facts into a database and each customer could crunch numbers to determine the optimum solution.

Thus, your sales discovery process should be optimised to build a trusting business relationship.   

After the discovery call: Don’t fumble the handoff

When the discovery call goes well, the caller and the prospect put the wheels in motion for more calls to put both sides on the path to a sale.

It’s all good with one exception: After the discovery call, the sales rep usually has to hand information off to business-development reps, account executives, client services managers, and many others who must come into the sales process.

The challenge here is that everybody on the sales team needs access to discovery call information. If they can’t get it, then the handoff becomes a buyer experience fumble.

Why? Because prospects have to explain the same litany of challenges over and over—to all your people and many other vendors. Nobody likes a botched handoff. At best, they grit their teeth and put up with it.

If the rest of your sales team cannot access discovery call information, it’s more difficult for them to understand the prospect’s needs and create customised solutions that make your product/service invaluable to the client.

Thus, improving internal sales communication and preventing a bad handoff—and the grumbling it causes—is a great way to optimise the discovery call, elevate your buyer experience, and differentiate yourself from the competitors who keep imposing these pain points on their prospects.

Here’s how to make that happen:

• Create a methodology to document discovery call insights and store them in a central location that key people can access before talking to prospects.
• Make it easy for your discovery call rep to take detailed notes explaining all the key knowledge learned during the call. Create a template, a cheat sheet, or an online form to gather and centralise discovery call information.
• If you have a CRM (which you should) platform, make sure to attach the results of your discovery call to the client account and to the prospect’s file.   
• When all the key people in your sales process know all the key facts about the prospect, they can expedite calls and talk to more prospects, potentially improving sales volume.

A solution for handoff challenges

Tools like Salesforce allows users to import contacts and develop account maps revealing all the key people in their sales processes.

Account maps allow sales reps to visualise the political landscape of a company and reveal all of the key stakeholders. And, most crucially, all the insights from the discovery call can be included within the account map.

Visualising the connections between sales contacts makes it easier to make sense of the sales process. These connections are crucial because you’re not simply selling to one person: You’re creating consensus among multiple stakeholders.

With the integration, all account maps are centrally stored and managed in Salesforce, so anyone with access to an account record or opportunity will have access to that account map and be able to quickly understand a deal’s status.

Account maps can also:

• Show how each contact feels about the product. Are they a champion? Do they like a competitor better?
• State the contact’s goals, so the sales team knows how to better sell to them or get the company to adopt your product more widely.
• Help your salespeople make quicker, smarter decisions that optimise your sales operations.
• Armed with the knowledge from a discovery call, salespeople can strengthen the emotional connections between buyers and sellers.

Everything in sales flows from an effective discovery call. Fine-tuning these calls to enhance the buyer experience makes your sales organisation more efficient and gets solutions into your customers’ hands sooner.

Sales Pipelines

Businesses consistently exceeding their revenue goals have an effective sales process with a growing sales pipeline. They always keep their pipeline full and have smart ways to turn data into valuable insights.

However, more than 40% of businesses fail to hit revenue goals. If you’re one of them, you need a better sales pipeline management system. Without visibility into the sales pipeline, you’ll miss crucial insights that lead to lost sales.

Sales processes are different for every company — and even for products within the same company. So you’ll need a unique sales pipeline that reflects a typical buyer’s journey.

Each prospect moves through the sales pipeline at a different rate based on their level of interest, urgency, and amount of research they’ve done on a product or service.

Some prospects may even skip stages. For example, suppose an excited buyer reaches out through a referral and proactively introduces you to the budget authority before you ask. In that case, you’d move the deal straight from “initial connect” to “meeting with the decision-maker.”

By determining what stage of the sales process prospects are in and projecting how many of them will close within a specific timeframe, the sales pipeline allows reps and managers to forecast revenue.

Sales Pipeline vs. Sales Forecast

People often confuse “sales pipelines” with “sales forecasts,” but they have different meanings.

A sales pipeline includes every opportunity a salesperson handles (no matter how new or mature it is). Reps use it to track where prospects are in the sales process and determine the most effective way to proceed.

A sales forecast estimates the opportunities likely to close in a given timeframe. It shows your sales team how close they are to reaching their goals and helps them prepare for what’s to come.

For example, if a sales forecast anticipates missing your quota, you should double down on selling activities. But if it estimates a 150% growth compared to the last month, you’d want to scale back your efforts and start laying the groundwork for an equally successful next month.

Once you’ve started tracking your sales pipeline, that data can allow you to create a forecast using sales forecasting software.

It always amazes me every time I go into a new client onboarding or even on the discovery call stage that has a CRM in place, but it’s not fully utilised. What I mean by this is each of their sales team has its list of prospects and only enters the details onto the CRM once the customer signs or is about to (ie contract sent). 

It’s insane. 

So let’s look at how to build a sales pipeline.

First things first…

Define the stages of your sales pipeline

While the quickest way to define your sales pipeline stages might be by copying a template, developing your own is worth the time and effort.

After all, the pipeline stages must match your prospect’s buying journey to help you track progress and predict revenue effectively. However, customers undergo a typical process:

• Awareness. The buyer realises they have a pain point or opportunity.
• Consideration. The buyer defines their paint point, develops evaluation criteria, and researches potential approaches.
• Decision. The buyer has finalised their strategy and compares vendors/specific solutions.

To illustrate, check out this hypothetical buyer’s journey:

With that in mind, your sales pipeline stages might be:

• Connect. The buyer engages with your company through an email from a salesperson, a webinar, or a piece of content.
• Appointment set. The buyer agrees to a meeting to learn more about how you can help them.
• Appointment completed. They attended the meeting, and you confirmed the next steps.
• Solution-proposed. The buyer wants to use your product to solve their pain point or capitalise on their opportunity.
• Proposal sent. The buyer reviews your proposal or contract.

Note that this is a standard explanation, the more complex your product, the longer your sales cycle will take — and the more sales pipeline stages there may be.

Given that we onboard our sales team within yours, it’s an imperative move that the sales pipeline is developed so that clear visibility is available to both your business and ours.

Identify how many opportunities continue through each stage

You should know how long prospects spend in each stage — both across the board and for closed/won deals. For example, the average prospect may spend two weeks in the demo stage, while those who eventually buy spend three weeks.

You should also know the percentage of opportunities that advance to the next stage.

And it’s critical to establish yield probability (or conversion rate) per stage. Perhaps prospects are 75% likely to buy in the demo stage and 90% likely to buy in the negotiation stage. Once you’ve assigned these percentages to each stage, you can develop monthly or quarterly revenue estimates.

Knowing these benchmarks will help your reps and sales managers predict which opportunities will likely close.

Calculate the opportunities you need to hit your goals

Now you can work backward to determine how many opportunities you need in each pipeline stage. Start with your target monthly or quarterly revenue divided by your average deal size, so you know how many deals you need to win.

Next, divide your target deal number by your yield probability per stage. If you need to win 135 deals, and your reps typically close 90% of deals in the negotiation stage, 150 opportunities must reach that stage in a month.

Repeat this process for every stage. Once you have total milestones, you can divide these goals by salesperson.

Here’s an example from Bob Marsh, CEO of LevelEleven. Assume you need 2,000 deals per year to hit your target bookings.

• 2,000 deals/year = 167 deals per month
• 8,000 proposals/year = 667 proposals per month
• 32,000 meetings/year = 640 meetings per week
• 64,000 calls/year = 256 calls per day

If you have a 100-person team, that translates to:

• 167 deals per month/100 reps = 2 deals per month
• 667 proposals per month/100 reps = 7 proposals per month
• 640 meetings per week/100 reps = 7 meetings per week

256 conversations per day/100 reps = 3 calls per day

Salespeople can use these benchmarks to measure their progress against the targets.

Keep in mind that every rep’s conversion rates will vary by stage. For example, if one of your salespeople struggles to prospect but has an excellent demo-to-close rate, they’ll need fewer initial meetings than their peers to meet the quota

Now, let’s look at a vastly overlooked element within the entire pipeline process…

Understand the commonalities between opportunities that convert

We need to pinpoint the common characteristics of opportunities that convert for every stage. These include the rep’s actions (like sending a follow-up email) and prospect responses (agreeing to a demo).

Knowing these patterns will help optimise your sales process for better closing rates and this is why it’s important to hold regular meetings and training to identify strengths and weaknesses throughout the entire sales pipeline and processes to convert. 

Don’t leave these things to chance. The more data and feedback we can get, the more refined process we can implement which allows us to fully scale our efforts and our turnover. 

Create or adapt your sales process around this data

Create a sales process or update your existing one around these actions and numbers. A strong sales process helps reps consistently close deals by giving them a proven framework to follow.

By incorporating your sales pipeline data, you can shift your sales process to move your prospects and opportunities closer to close.

Continuously add leads to your pipeline

This sounds like an obvious one, but establishing a sales process isn’t enough.

As many reps aren’t too big on prospecting, it’s easy to end up with a dry sales pipeline once you build one.

Since many sales teams focus more on closing deals, they tend to forget prospecting for the upcoming month, and when the next month comes, they’re way behind their schedule.

In an ideal sales pipeline, you should always have more opportunities in the prospecting part than in the closing part. That’s because the number of prospects in each stage progressively decreases while the probability of closing progressively increases.

Even if you have enough leads for a month, it’s good to have a diversified prospecting strategy, so you keep adding new leads for upcoming months.

It shouldn’t always include traditional methods like cold calling; you can encourage reps to try multiple strategies. For example, HubSpot research shows that social media effectively finds new leads for 56% of sales professionals.

Lead generation and prospecting tools are an imperative approach to help aggregate potential leads and track their status. That way, we always know how many leads you’ve got and what stage they’re in.

We have covered this earlier so, this brings us to the next important factor…

Maintain the health of your pipeline

60% of prospects say no four times before saying yes. Still, nearly half of the salespeople never follow up. This indicates that you’ll definitely lose leads if you don’t establish a five (or more) step follow-up process throughout your sales pipeline.

Give your team a system for following up with leads, including timing, cadence, and contact method. Set clear expectations like:

• Every inbound lead is contacted within six hours or less.
• Every lead receives 10-12 touches spread out over one month.
• Every lead receives various email, phone, and social media touches.
• Every touch includes new information or resources.

A uniform follow-up strategy helps your reps maintain clean pipelines by telling them when to disqualify prospects. If a prospect hasn’t responded by the last touch, they should be removed from the pipeline.

After this, we need to look at…

Cleaning your sales pipeline regularly

Cleaning up your pipeline is critical if you want an accurate sales forecast. That’s because most forecasts use each opportunity’s stage to determine how likely it is to close — not its age.

Suppose you sent a proposal for a £2,000 deal to the buyer one month ago. Since then, he hasn’t returned any of your calls or emails, which suggests you’re not getting his business.

However, since opportunities in the negotiation stage have a 90% close rate, your sales forecast would count this deal as £1,800 in potential revenue in the next month.

That means your sales forecast is £1,800 off. Similarly, every stale deal will further widen the gap between expectations and reality.

Sales Pipeline Management

Sales pipeline management is an estimate of how much money you’ll make from current sales opportunities. It allows sales reps to organise and monitor prospects and see how deals are tracking against their monthly, quarterly, and annual goals.

To calculate this, you’ll need to know the following:

• How many opportunities your sales reps are actively working.
• Which stage is each opportunity in.
• How many opportunities typically pass from one stage to the next.
• The average deal size.
• Average sales cycle length.

Of course, with more historical data, your predictions will be more accurate, but it’s ok to make informed guesses.

For example, let’s say you just shifted upmarket. Based on preliminary research, early sales, and talking to other companies selling similar products, you might predict your new sales cycle will last five months.

Luckily, a CRM can calculate these metrics for you and provide greater visibility into pipeline activities.

By properly utilising your CRM, we can calculate these metrics for you and provide greater visibility into pipeline activities.

And lastly, in this section, we need to look at…

Sales Pipeline Velocity

Pipeline velocity is the speed at which leads move through your sales pipeline. The formula: the number of deals in your pipeline X the overall win rate percentage X average deal size ($) / length of sales cycle (days).

So, how do we calculate sales pipeline velocity?

Suppose you have 50 opportunities in your sales pipeline. Your average win rate is 40%, and your average deal size is £10,000. And the sales process usually takes 70 days, from initial contact to the signed proposal.

Your pipeline velocity = 50 x .4 x 10,000 / 70, or £2,587.14.

That means approximately £2,587.14 is moving through your sales pipeline every day. Obviously, the higher your velocity, the better.

So, how can you increase the pipeline velocity?

You can pull four main levers, and unsurprisingly, they correlate to the four factors of the equation.

• The number of total opportunities. Increase your prospecting efforts to get more opportunities.
• Win rate. One-on-one weekly coaching helps sales reps deliver high performance. You can improve this metric by investing in sales training and enablement.
• Deal size. Help your reps sell bigger deals by teaching them how to upsell, cross-sell or target larger customers.
• Sales cycle. Have a well-defined sales process and ensure reps follow it. Leave room to test new strategies, whilst introducing automated systems and everything else covered within this playbook.

In addition to pipeline velocity, keep a close eye on your conversion rates by stage, so you know where prospects drop out of your sales funnel.

Suppose 60% of your prospects go from the presentation to the proposal. Think about why 40% of them drop out. It’s normal to have attrition between stages, but you should investigate if there’s a more significant problem.

Perhaps your salespeople aren’t effectively conveying your product’s value or haven’t done enough analysis to tie their presentation to their prospects’ pain points.

If you don’t monitor and investigate these metrics, you might not uncover pressing problems in time.

Master your sales pipeline, and you’ll master your results. The sales pipeline isn’t just a benefit to the sales team — when the entire organisation is aligned around revenue goals, every team succeeds. Whether your business is disrupted by a new competitor, a major opportunity, an industry shift, or an internal strategic change, use these tips and the sales pipeline template to forecast your deals.

Onboarding Commission-Only Sales Teams For De-Risked Scaling

Once we have implemented the core systems that we have previously outlined, and outreach begins to scale, it’s important to outline that your current sales team will not be able to handle the influx of work, even after we streamline their day and properly prioritise their working hours structure.

To combat this, we run a team of commission-only sales reps that are experienced exclusively within the technology sector who are highly knowledgeable of the industry as well as closing properly in order to provide customers that keep coming back.

It’s important to note that the team is not a smash-and-grab solution. All of whom are highly vetted and paid accordingly for their efforts. 

Let’s look at a few factors when it comes to commission-only reps working within your business:

Cost-effective: Hiring commission-only sales reps can be a cost-effective strategy for businesses, especially startups or companies with limited resources. Since these reps are compensated solely through commissions, there is no fixed base salary or benefits to be paid by the company. This arrangement allows businesses to allocate their budget more efficiently, as they only incur expenses when sales are generated.

Motivated and results-driven: Commission-only sales reps are highly motivated to succeed because their earnings depend directly on their sales performance. This compensation structure incentivizes them to work harder and be more proactive in pursuing leads, closing deals, and exceeding sales targets. Their focus on achieving results can bring a higher level of dedication and drive to the sales team.

Scalability and flexibility: When a company experiences fluctuations in its sales cycle or needs to rapidly scale its sales force, commission-only sales reps offer a flexible solution. Businesses can quickly onboard new reps without significant financial commitments, and if the market demand changes, they have the flexibility to adjust the size of the team accordingly. This scalability allows companies to adapt to market conditions and manage their sales resources effectively.

Expertise and industry knowledge: Our reps often have expertise and experience in their respective industries. Since they are self-employed or independent contractors, they may have worked with multiple clients and gained a deep understanding of the market, products, and customer preferences. This knowledge can be leveraged to drive sales, provide valuable insights, and build stronger customer relationships.

Risk-sharing: With a commission-only sales team, the risk associated with generating sales is shared between the company and the sales reps. If the sales team fails to deliver results, the company doesn’t incur fixed costs and can adjust its strategy accordingly. On the other hand, if the team performs exceptionally well, both the reps and the company benefit from increased earnings. This risk-sharing arrangement can be advantageous for businesses, especially in uncertain or competitive markets.

Expanded reach and customer base: By onboarding commission-only sales reps, companies can tap into new markets and reach a broader customer base. Sales reps typically have their own networks and established relationships, which can open doors to potential clients and provide access to new opportunities. This extended reach can accelerate the company’s sales growth and increase its market presence.

We ensure proper training, support, and motivation for these reps are built on a continued basis. Clear communication, well-defined sales targets, and a fair commission structure are essential to foster a productive and successful relationship between everyone involved and in essence, are part of your team as much as they are part of ours. 

How To Properly Create WhitePapers That Drive Sales

Between the worlds of long-form article content and e-books, an additional level often ignored by content marketers exists. White papers are more than articles, but they often lack the length of e-books.

This grey area can leave marketers confused. How do you promote a white paper? What types of content should be included in it? How will you know if it’s a success? These valid questions are ones that any content creator should ask before they develop something.

By understanding the purpose of white papers and the expectations of audiences, you can create a white paper that generates results. Discover how you can use white papers successfully within your marketing strategy.

Now, here’s where many go wrong on whitepapers because they don’t really understand why they are creating them nor when they should be using them…

White Papers Are Mid-Funnel Content

One of the main reasons companies struggle to use white papers in their content strategies is that they don’t know where these marketing materials fall in the sales funnel. White papers are typically either promoted as a top-funnel product that’s meant to drive traffic or a bottom-funnel sales tool meant to close deals. Often, companies give up when the white paper fails to accomplish either of these tasks.

White papers are typically mid-funnel content. They’re rarely viral gold, and they don’t close as well as your sales team, but they’re still important. The goal of mid-funnel content is to teach people about your brand and prove to audiences that you are an expert in your industry. Your interactive infographic may have brought an audience to your website, but your white paper will make them want to stay.

By focusing on mid-funnel content metrics, such as bringing return visitors back to your website and keeping them on your pages longer, you can create goals to measure the success of your white paper that are better aligned with your sales process.

Creating a quality B2B white paper is no easy feat, as its demands for research, copywriting, and design are greater than those of a typical blog post. However, all efforts put towards its production are null and void if you don’t put a promotional strategy in place. The following article will help you create a comprehensive marketing plan for drawing target audiences’ attention to your white paper.

How to Strategically Select White Paper Themes of Interest 

This may seem to be an obvious point, but it’s worth underscoring nonetheless: your white paper marketing strategy doesn’t start with promotional tactics, but rather choosing the right hook. You want to write about a topic for which your B2B audience is hungry. Ways you can identify potential themes include:

• Brainstorm with the help of Direct Sales, Partners, and Customer Success teams. Marketers don’t have the same level of face-to-face interactions as other divisions, so invite sales representatives to put your heads together. Ask what questions they frequently receive, what the industry is buzzing about, and whether there are pain points with which audiences need guidance. Channel partners are extra helpful, as they represent outside eyes and may serve different audiences than Direct Sales. 
• Keyword search volume. Think of keyword search volume as a tool for comparing various content topics. If one subject matter receives a higher number of searches than another, it’s safe to assume that the more popular of the two would generate greater reader interest. However, don’t regard keyword search volume as foolproof. Many SEO tools don’t capture present trends (instead, reflect evergreen data). What’s more, it fails to represent the quality or relevance of those searching for the terms. If one search theme generates 500 monthly searchers, but those individuals don’t align with your target audience, the data is no longer valuable. So, in short, think of keyword research as one of many ways you can narrow your list of strong whitepaper themes rather than the sole strategy you utilise. 
• Target white papers towards specific sects of potential customers. Let’s say you build software for employee benefits management; the concerns of an HR Director will vary from the Head of Accounting or the COO. Therefore, your writers should ideally have a set audience in mind when crafting the white paper. Similarly, the same target audience should be at the forefront of your mind when shaping your promotional strategy. 
• Refresh older marketing white papers to reflect today’s best practices. Many of the overarching business needs of past years still hold true today, presenting opportunities to revisit past success stories. If your 2017 white paper Supporting Sustainability Within Supply Chain Operations was a major hit, why not renew it for 2022? Update the copy to reflect the latest state of the world and updated practices while leveraging existing talking points that still apply. 
• White Paper Submission Sites – There are a number of whitepaper submission/ syndication sites, such as Find White Papers, CIO white papers review, White Paper Central, and Tech Target, which offer both free and pay-per-lead schemes for promoting your whitepapers. It probably depends largely on your niche as to whether this would likely drive leads or not, but as you can give them a shot for free it’s probably worth doing anyway. They make sure that the content is seen by the desired demographics.
• Transform winning blog posts into white papers. Similar to the above, you can use blog posts to gauge users’ response rates to various topics. For instance, if an 800-word article generated above-average interactions among social followers and email subscribers, you can transform the content into a 3,000-word white paper. 
• Webinar or Event Hosting: Invite people and influence them to buy your products and services. By hosting a webinar, event or a meet up where you offer your white paper as a gift to participants, you can drive up downloads and generate valuable leads. Make the webinar a next step that leads can take after they read your white paper.

What you should not do is write about a topic simply to mimic competitors. We all look over each other’s shoulders to see which competitors’ activities generate success. However, the goal should be to strategically get ahead of like-minded companies rather than following in their footsteps. If multiple competitors write about the same topic, ask yourself the following before making their whitepaper strategy your own: 

• Can I execute this particular tactic better?
• Do I have something unique to say about the subject matter? 

If you can’t answer affirmatively to either, focus your whitepaper strategies on fulfilling underserved needs rather than simply hitting the same talking points as everyone else. 

Now on to note 2 and this is super important because it is the key factor that we can do where most people don’t – and it is the absolute crucial factor that helps position your business whilst also simultaneously driving SEO and authority development for the company, along with the leaders involved…

Provide within the whitepaper the following:

1. Heavily researched stats
2. Referenceable tables and charts that can be found on Google

Then after the whitepaper is complete, 

• Devise a list of sites and pages that are centred around your topic and commit to contacting every one of the journalists and editors as this will enable them to feature the whitepaper, thus driving the traffic and positioning even further. 

It’s incredible how many companies create whitepapers and miss out on these few simple yet incredibly influential steps. 

The whole point is to position your business while having credible resources and material to send to potential prospects. Missing out these steps is to simply do a bucketload of words without any of the true rewards because let’s face it, the way most people do whitepapers is pretty pointless and done only through habit.

Crafting Foundational Copy

Introduction to Foundational Copy

Copywriting is an art, and when done correctly, it’s an incredible tool for communication, persuasion, and connection. The foundational copy is the cornerstone of this artistry. It’s your brand’s voice, your unique selling proposition, and the key to telling your brand story throughout your marketing materials.

Why Foundational Copy is Important

Foundational copy is a pivotal component in all marketing endeavours because it serves as the core messaging that defines your brand, products, or services. It articulates your company’s values, mission, and unique selling proposition in a manner that resonates with your target audience. Effective foundational copy is consistently utilised across all platforms, ensuring a unified brand voice and a clear, cohesive message, thus enhancing brand recognition and trust.

In many cases, the difference between good and bad copy can seem minute. However the difference between the two – when looking right across the board of all material – can be substantial, both in terms of conversions and ROI throughout.

Moreover, foundational copy offers a clear roadmap for all subsequent marketing efforts. Whether you’re crafting a social media post, a blog article, or an email campaign, the foundational copy serves as your guideline, ensuring all content aligns with your brand’s core messaging. By leveraging foundational copy in all marketing, you strengthen your brand identity, foster customer loyalty, and effectively communicate the value you provide, thus driving business growth.

Building Brand Identity

Why should someone buy from you and not from your competitor? It’s your unique brand identity that makes you stand out. Your foundational copy, infused with your brand’s tone, values, and personality, can powerfully distinguish your business in the crowded marketplace.

Engaging Your Audience

In today’s digital age, people are bombarded with countless messages and ads every day. If you want to cut through the noise, your copy must engage, captivate, and resonate with your target audience. That’s where foundational copy comes in. It hooks your audience and encourages them to take the next step.

Increasing Conversions

Compelling foundational copy can dramatically boost your conversions. It persuades your audience, compelling them to act—whether that’s signing up for a newsletter, downloading a whitepaper, or making a purchase.

Crafting Compelling Foundational Copy

Know Your Audience

Before you put pen to paper, you need to know who you’re talking to. Who are your customers? What do they want or need? What problems are they trying to solve? Understanding your audience ensures your copy speaks directly to them.

Tell a Story

Stories are persuasive. They connect with people on an emotional level, and when people feel, they act. So, tell your brand’s story in your foundational copy. Connect it with your audience’s needs and desires, and you’ll create an emotional bond that propels action.

Use Persuasive Language

Powerful copywriting employs persuasive language. It uses strong action verbs, paints vivid pictures, and employs rhetorical questions that engage readers. Remember, every word in your foundational copy should serve a purpose—persuading your audience to take action.

Applying Foundational Copy in Your Marketing Material

Email Copy

Email is a powerful tool for connecting with your audience. Whether you’re sending a promotional email, a newsletter, or a welcome email, your foundational copy should be consistent, engaging, and persuasive.

Whitepapers

Whitepapers are a great tool to showcase your expertise. They offer in-depth, valuable content to your audience. But without compelling copy, your whitepapers will fail to engage. Use your foundational copy to make your whitepapers irresistible.

Lead Magnets

Lead magnets are about value exchange. You’re offering something valuable (an eBook, a discount, a free trial) in exchange for contact information. Your foundational copy plays a pivotal role in convincing your audience that what you’re offering is worth their details.

Conclusion

Crafting and applying compelling foundational copy throughout your marketing material is crucial for your business. It helps create a strong brand identity, engages your audience, and drives conversions. So, understand your audience, tell a compelling story, and use persuasive language to create copy that moves your audience to action.

Communicating Vision Consistently: A Vital Strategy for Business Success

For a business to thrive, its vision should not only be compelling and inspiring but also consistently communicated. A well-articulated and regularly reinforced vision creates unity, aligns actions, and guides decision-making, thereby fostering a strong, cohesive business structure.

The Importance of Consistent Vision Communication

Every company’s vision will be different. Some companies live boldly by theirs whilst others seem to forget why they started in the first place. 

As leaders of the business, it’s paramount that you deliver this message consistently to both your team and the outside world.

Internal Impact

Consistently communicating the business vision internally has a profound effect on the company. It aligns teams around common goals, motivates employees, and fosters a shared sense of purpose. This alignment propels productivity, encourages innovation, and improves employee satisfaction and retention.

External Influence

Externally, a consistently communicated vision influences customers, investors, and other stakeholders. It helps shape the brand’s image, instils trust, and builds stronger relationships with customers. Additionally, it attracts like-minded investors and partners, aiding business growth.

Tactics for Communicating Vision Consistently

Effective communication of a business vision requires strategic methods. Here are some tactics:

Embedding the Vision in Company Culture

The vision should be embedded in the company culture. It must be incorporated into training programs, meetings, and other internal communication channels to ensure every employee understands and aligns with it.

Using Multichannel Communication

Leverage various communication channels, such as company newsletters, social media, and PR campaigns, to regularly share your vision. Each platform offers a unique way to convey the vision and reach different audience segments.

Making the Vision Tangible

Make the vision tangible by tying it to specific goals, KPIs, and milestones. This allows employees and stakeholders to understand what the vision means in practical terms and how their actions contribute to realising it.

Reinforcing the Vision Regularly

The vision should not be a one-time announcement but a constant message reinforced regularly. Repeat it in team meetings, integrate it into branding materials, and celebrate successes that align with the vision.

So, in conclusion to communicating the vision…

Consistently communicating the business vision, both internally and externally, is vital for long-term success. Through strategic methods and regular reinforcement, a compelling vision can align teams, motivate employees, shape the brand’s image, and foster stronger relationships with stakeholders. Implement these tactics to ensure your business vision propels your company forward.

Funnels

The business world today is characterised by dynamic changes, strategic manoeuvring, and relentless competition. To thrive amidst this whirlwind of economic activity, businesses must understand and adapt to the modern ways of promoting and selling their products or services. For businesses that operate in the B2B sector, this means mastering the art of B2B marketing funnels.

B2B marketing funnels represent the path that your potential clients traverse from the moment they first encounter your brand to the point where they become loyal customers. This journey is not always linear or predictable, but it’s essential for driving growth and profitability. B2B marketing funnels serve as a map that guides the prospective client through the buyer’s journey, while at the same time, providing businesses with invaluable insights on how to enhance this journey.

The B2B marketing funnel goes beyond traditional marketing tactics and dives deeper into understanding customer behaviour, needs, and expectations at each stage of the buying process. In essence, it’s a strategic approach to B2B marketing that emphasises building strong and lasting relationships with clients.

In the digital age, where information is abundant and buyer empowerment is high, businesses must do more than just create awareness about their offerings. They need to provide value at every stage of the customer journey and convince the potential client that their solution is the best fit for their problem. This is where a well-structured B2B marketing funnel becomes a powerful tool.

Understanding the dynamics and intricacies of the B2B marketing funnel can transform your business operations, create meaningful customer relationships, and ultimately, boost your bottom line. In this guide, we delve deep into the concept of B2B marketing funnels, its significance, stages, and how to create one that effectively converts leads into loyal customers. We also provide examples and actionable tips to guide you in creating a B2B marketing funnel that will set your business apart in the increasingly competitive B2B landscape.

The Importance of a B2B Marketing Funnel

When you’re in the B2B space, your marketing strategies should be designed around one critical element – the customer journey. Your marketing funnel, when done correctly, maps this journey and guides potential customers through their buying process, nudging them gently from awareness to consideration, and finally, the decision to purchase.

Defining the B2B Marketing Funnel

So, what is a B2B marketing funnel exactly? Simply put, it’s a representation of the customer’s journey from discovering your brand to becoming a loyal customer. It’s your guiding light for creating marketing strategies tailored to where your customers are in their journey.

Stages of the B2B Marketing Funnel

Awareness Stage

The top of the funnel (TOFU) represents the “Awareness” stage. Here, potential customers are just discovering your brand. They’ve identified a problem or need, and they’re looking for information. Your goal at this stage is to provide high-quality, educational content to position your brand as a reliable source of information.

Consideration Stage

Next is the “Consideration” stage, or the middle of the funnel (MOFU). At this point, your prospects understand their problem and are actively looking for solutions. You should be offering detailed content that highlights your products or services as viable solutions.

Decision Stage

Finally, we have the “Decision” stage, or the bottom of the funnel (BOFU). Here, your potential customers are ready to make a purchase decision. It’s your job to make sure they choose your brand over competitors. Offering things like free trials, product demos, and customer testimonials can help tip the balance in your favour.

Creating a B2B Marketing Funnel

Identifying Target Audience

The first step in creating a B2B marketing funnel is identifying your target audience. Who are they? What are their needs and pain points? This understanding will guide the rest of your funnel creation process.

Creating Engaging Content

Next, you need to create engaging content. Remember, your content should match the different stages of your funnel. It should educate, inspire, and convince your prospects to choose your product or service.

Lead Nurturing

Lastly, your funnel should include a lead nurturing strategy. Not all leads will immediately move from awareness to decision. By nurturing these leads – through things like personalised emails and retargeting ads – you can keep your brand top of mind and gently guide them towards a purchase.

Examples of Effective B2B Marketing Funnels

Take HubSpot, for example, they’ve mastered the art of the B2B marketing funnel. From offering free educational content to personalised demo offers, they’ve created a funnel that continuously turns leads into customers.

Common Mistakes in B2B Marketing Funnels

One common mistake in B2B marketing funnels is failing to nurture leads properly. Remember, B2B buying decisions often take time. Rushing leads through your funnel or neglecting to follow up can result in lost opportunities.

Tips for an Efficient B2B Marketing Funnel

Keep your funnel efficient by consistently analysing and adjusting. Look at where prospects are dropping off and address any potential issues. Experiment with different types of content and strategies to see what resonates best with your audience.

Webinars

Webinars are an excellent way of building up interest both short and long-term, whilst simultaneously positioning both the business and the team within a position of authority within the market. 

However, most webinars suck and do more harm than good and what’s worse, even the good ones are not proposed in a way that continually draws in business through an ecosystem of content.

Let’s look at how to do them properly so that there is both evergreen content and automated funnels in which you can continue to nurture your leads whilst simultaneously position the business in a much more authoritative position.

But, What Is A Webinar?

As a B2B marketer, your mission is to communicate complex ideas, build relationships, and convert high-value customers. In the digital age, one tool stands out in its ability to accomplish these goals.

In essence, a webinar is a seminar conducted over the internet. It allows you to share presentations, demonstrations, or discussions with a wide audience, without the limitations of geographical location.

Key Elements of a Webinar

Webinars typically include live or prerecorded video, audio, and interactive elements such as Q&A sessions, chat, and polls. They provide a platform to communicate with an engaged audience in real time, fostering two-way communication and relationship-building.

The Importance of Webinars in B2B Marketing

Webinars play a critical role in B2B marketing, providing value across various stages of the buyer’s journey.

Lead Generation

Building an email list through webinars is simpler than you might think. It starts with a captivating webinar topic, a solid registration process, and effective follow-up. Each step of the way, your list grows, packed with potential leads genuinely interested in your business.

Webinars are powerful lead generation tools. Attendees must register beforehand, providing valuable information for your marketing database.

Positioning Your Business and Team as Authority Figures

Why Establish Authority?

Why should a business seek to establish itself as an authority figure? The answer lies in trust. Customers are more likely to buy from businesses they trust, and authority is a key building block of trust.

Role of Webinars in Authority Building

Webinars provide a stage to showcase your knowledge, insights, and expertise. They also create a space for interactive dialogue, which can enhance your reputation as an industry leader.

Benefits of Combining Email List Building and Authority Positioning

Synergistic Effects of Webinars

Webinars work as a symbiotic relationship, feeding both email list growth and authority positioning. They offer a platform for businesses to demonstrate their knowledge while collecting contact information for potential clients.

Real-Life Examples of Successful Implementation

Businesses such as Leadpages and Buffer have successfully harnessed the power of webinars, simultaneously boosting their email lists and industry authority. Following in their footsteps, your business could also enjoy the webinar-induced prosperity.

Hosting a webinar allows you to showcase your company’s expertise, positioning your business as an industry leader and thought authority.

Sales Enablement

Sales teams can use webinars to present product demos, explain complex features, and answer potential customers’ queries. They’re a perfect platform to engage and nurture leads, encouraging conversion.

Customer Retention and Upselling

Existing customers can benefit from webinars too. Training webinars help users get the most out of your product or service, improving customer satisfaction and opening opportunities for upselling.

How to Implement a Successful B2B Webinar

Planning Your Webinar

The first step to a successful webinar is planning. Determine your objectives, choose a compelling topic, and identify your target audience.

Promoting Your Webinar

Use email marketing, social media, and your company blog to get the word out. Remember, the more attendees, the better the opportunity for lead generation and thought leadership.

Hosting Your Webinar

Ensure a smooth webinar by conducting a dry run beforehand. Encourage interactivity through live chats, Q&As, and polls. The more engaged your audience, the better the results.

Follow-Up After the Webinar

Follow-up emails with a recording of the webinar, additional resources, and a call to action keep the momentum going and extend the value of the webinar beyond the live event.

Conclusion

The beauty of webinars is their ability to tackle two crucial elements of business growth—building an email list and positioning your business as an industry authority—at once. By crafting engaging, valuable webinars, you can expand your reach, cultivate trust, and position your business for long-term growth.

B2B Newsletter Models

In the B2B sector, cultivating long-term relationships with clients is key to maintaining a sustainable business. One effective way to maintain engagement with your audience is through regular newsletters. This article will explore various B2B newsletter models and provide insight into choosing the right one for your business.

Understanding B2B Newsletters

A B2B newsletter is a periodic email sent to subscribers containing relevant industry news, updates about your business, informative articles, or promotional offers. It’s an excellent tool for keeping your brand at the forefront of customers’ minds, nurturing leads, and driving engagement.

Different B2B Newsletter Models

Each type of newsletter serves a specific purpose and aligns with different strategic goals. Let’s explore some of the most common B2B newsletter models:

The Thought Leadership Newsletter

This model involves creating and sharing original content that establishes your business as an expert in the industry. These newsletters often feature blog posts, white papers, case studies, or webinars that provide valuable insights and help to build trust with your audience.

The Curated Content Newsletter

Instead of focusing on original content, this model involves gathering and sharing content from various external sources that your audience will find interesting or valuable. It’s a great way to provide value to your readers without needing to create all the content yourself.

The Promotional Newsletter

As the name suggests, this model is used to advertise products or services, announce sales or special promotions, or introduce new offerings. While this approach can drive direct sales, it’s important to balance promotional content with informative, non-salesy content to avoid overwhelming your audience.

The Hybrid Newsletter

A hybrid newsletter combines elements of the previous models, providing a mix of original and curated content, as well as promotional materials. This model can offer a comprehensive approach to engagement, provided the content mix aligns with your audience’s needs and interests.

How to Choose the Right B2B Newsletter Model

When it comes to choosing the right newsletter model for your business, consider the following factors:

Understand Your Audience

Analyse your audience’s preferences and behaviours. Are they seeking expert insights, industry news, special offers, or a mix of all three? Audience understanding is the foundation of any successful newsletter strategy.

Align With Your Marketing Goals

Identify your marketing goals. Are you looking to position yourself as a thought leader, drive sales, or maintain customer engagement? Your goals should guide the type of newsletter model you choose.

Consider Your Content Resources

Assess your capacity to create content. Original, quality content requires resources, but curated content requires a keen eye for industry trends and valuable insights. Your resources will heavily influence your choice of newsletter model.

Conclusion

Newsletters are a critical part of B2B communication, and choosing the right model can significantly impact your marketing success. By understanding your audience, aligning with your goals, and considering your resources, you can choose a newsletter model that drives engagement and achieves your marketing objectives.

C-Suite Roundtables & Business Podcasts

In the competitive world of business, carving out a niche and establishing authority is paramount. C-Suite Roundtables and industry podcasts are two powerful avenues for this. Both can drive inbound marketing efforts, generate high-quality leads, and position your business as a thought leader. Let’s delve into how these strategies can benefit your business.

So let’s look at why C-Suite Roundables and having the leadership team feature on business podcasts can be both influential and beneficial to growing the business at a substantial rate.

The Power of C-Suite Roundtables

What is a C-Suite Roundtable?

A C-Suite Roundtable is a gathering of high-level executives (CEO, CFO, CTO, etc.) who discuss industry trends, challenges, and solutions. These events are typically closed-door, invite-only, and encourage deep, meaningful conversations.

Benefits of C-Suite Roundtables

C-Suite Roundtables allow your business leaders to share insights, demonstrate expertise, and build valuable relationships. They foster an environment of trust, often leading to business partnerships, collaborations, and referrals.

Why Feature on Industry Podcasts?

Podcasts have become an influential medium in the business world. Here’s why featuring on industry podcasts can be beneficial:

Reaching a Broader Audience

Podcasts have a wide reach and dedicated listeners. Featuring on a well-established industry podcast exposes your business to a larger audience, driving brand awareness and potential leads.

Establishing Authority

By discussing industry trends, sharing insights, and providing value on a podcast, you position your business as a knowledgeable authority. This helps build trust with potential customers and sets your brand apart from competitors.

The Inbound Marketing Perspective

Both C-Suite Roundtables and industry podcasts align well with inbound marketing strategies.

Generating Quality Leads

These initiatives attract individuals already interested in your industry or looking for solutions you provide. Therefore, they are likely to generate high-quality leads that are easier to convert.

Building Lasting Relationships

Through continuous value provision and engagement, both initiatives foster strong relationships with customers. This aligns with the inbound methodology’s focus on attracting, engaging, and delighting customers.

The Synergy of C-Suite Roundtables and Podcasts

When used together, C-Suite Roundtables and podcasts can create a powerful synergy. Roundtables provide deep insights and valuable connections, while podcasts broaden reach and build authority. Both feed into an inbound strategy, attracting high-quality leads through authority-building content.

Conclusion

C-Suite Roundtables and featuring on industry podcasts are powerful strategies for businesses looking to establish authority and generate leads. They align perfectly with an inbound marketing strategy, creating a holistic approach to attracting and converting customers. By leveraging these initiatives, businesses can distinguish themselves in a crowded marketplace and foster sustainable growth.

Sales Letters & VSLs

In an era of digital bombardment, effective communication can be a game-changer. Sales letters and video sales letters are tools that, when utilised correctly, can give your business a unique edge. Let’s delve into these underutilised strategies and how they can set your brand apart.

The Art of Sales Letters

Defining a Sales Letter

A sales letter is a persuasive document aimed at persuading the reader to purchase a product or service. It includes a compelling headline, a problem-solution narrative, testimonials, and a strong call-to-action.

Why Sales Letters Work

Sales letters can be highly effective. They provide a one-on-one communication channel between your business and potential customers, allowing you to articulate your value proposition clearly and persuasively.

The Power of Video Sales Letters

What is a Video Sales Letter?

A video sales letter (VSL) is a sales letter’s multimedia equivalent. It’s a persuasive video that promotes a product or service, often incorporating storytelling, product demos, and customer testimonials.

Benefits of Video Sales Letters

VSLs capitalise on the power of visual storytelling. They engage viewers on a deeper level, making complex information digestible and building emotional connections.

Why Many Companies Don’t Use Sales Letters

Despite their efficacy, many businesses shy away from sales letters and VSLs. This is often due to misconceptions about their complexity, time commitment, or datedness. Additionally, some companies prioritise newer digital marketing trends, overlooking these traditional yet effective methods.

Turning Industry Neglect Into Your Advantage

This general neglect presents a unique and huge opportunity for your business.

Let me explain…

Stand Out from the Crowd

By incorporating sales letters and VSLs into your strategy, you differentiate yourself from competitors who rely solely on more common digital marketing methods.

Cultivate a Personal Connection

Sales letters and VSLs can feel more personal and direct compared to other methods, building a stronger bond with your potential customers and increasing conversion rates.

Conclusion

While sales letters and video sales letters may seem traditional, they are far from obsolete. Their personal, direct approach can be incredibly effective in persuading potential customers. By incorporating these strategies into your marketing toolkit, you can leverage an untapped channel and gain a competitive edge.

C-Suite Networking: Driving Business Success Through Strategic Relationships

The influence of the C-Suite, the executive level of a company, extends beyond the confines of the boardroom. One of the most potent ways these top executives can steer their organisation towards success is through strategic C-Suite networking. Let’s explore what this entails and how it impacts your business.

Understanding C-Suite Networking

C-Suite networking involves building and maintaining relationships among high-level executives within and across industries. It encompasses attending industry conferences, participating in roundtable discussions, and leveraging social media platforms designed for professionals, like LinkedIn.

The Impact of C-Suite Networking on Business

C-Suite networking can be a game-changer for businesses. Here’s why:

Fostering Business Partnerships

Networking with other industry leaders opens doors to strategic partnerships. Such alliances can result in collaborations, joint ventures, or referrals, driving business growth.

Gaining Market Insights

Networking provides a platform for exchanging ideas and staying abreast of industry trends, challenges, and opportunities. This can inform strategic decisions and keep your business ahead of the curve.

Building Brand Credibility

By actively participating in industry forums and discussions, C-Suite executives can position their business as a thought leader, enhancing brand credibility and trust.

Best Practices for Effective C-Suite Networking

For C-Suite networking to be effective, it needs to be done right. Here are some best practices:

Be Prepared

Research the individuals and companies you’re networking with. Understand their role, industry, and challenges. This will enable meaningful conversations and mutual value exchange.

Focus on Relationship Building

Networking is not about selling, but building relationships. Be genuine, listen actively, and show interest in others’ perspectives. This fosters trust and long-term connections.

Engage in Peer-to-Peer Learning

C-Suite networking offers opportunities for peer-to-peer learning. Be open to new ideas and insights, and equally willing to share your expertise.

Maximising C-Suite Networking for Marketing

C-Suite networking can be a powerful marketing tool. By engaging with potential customers at an executive level, you can cultivate relationships that lead to business opportunities. Plus, the insights gained from these interactions can inform marketing strategies and tactics.

Conclusion

C-Suite networking, when executed strategically, can bring significant benefits to your business. It fosters valuable partnerships, provides critical market insights, and enhances brand credibility. By adopting the best practices, your business can make the most of C-Suite networking and position itself for sustained success.

Smart Paid Media Tactics

The Company Newsletter… A New Approach

******Explain how most companies talk about themselves and why this doesn’t work. Go on to explain that a B2B newsletter should cover everything about the market and work as though it is a separate entity writing it (Ie a company devoted entirely to sharing news and insight around the market)

Explain how this is the difference between a few hundred subscribers to over 100K in subs.******

Founder-Led Sales: The Secret Engine to Propel Your Company Forward

In the dynamic world of business, different sales strategies have varying impacts on a company’s trajectory. One particularly impactful approach is founder-led sales. This strategy can provide a unique competitive edge that drives companies forward.

This isn’t always ideal depending on the business but, in many instances, for a certain percentage of sales and with a particular project threshold, it can have many advantages to the long-term success of the business.

So, let’s look at a few factors…

Decoding Founder-Led Sales

Founder-led sales, as the name suggests, refers to a sales approach where a company’s founder takes a frontline role in selling their product or service. This could range from initial customer interactions and closing deals to long-term account management.

The Advantages of Founder-Led Sales

Founder-led sales brings a host of advantages that can be a catalyst for business growth. Let’s explore some of them:

Enhanced Customer Understanding

Who better to understand the product or service than the founder? This intimate knowledge allows founders to sell more effectively and gather valuable feedback directly from customers, leading to better product development and customer satisfaction.

Convincing Sales Narratives

Founders can tell their company’s story like no one else. This narrative, coupled with their passion, can be incredibly persuasive, building trust and fostering customer relationships.

Accelerated Company Growth

By being directly involved in sales, founders can quickly identify market trends, opportunities, and customer pain points. This accelerates decision-making and strategic shifts, driving faster company growth.

Founder-Led Sales: Not Just for Startups

While founder-led sales are often associated with startups, they are beneficial for businesses of all sizes. For established businesses, founder-led sales can bring a renewed focus on customer needs and market trends, driving innovation and growth.

Striking the Balance in Founder-Led Sales

Despite its benefits, founder-led sales should be balanced with other responsibilities. As a company grows, a founder’s involvement in day-to-day sales may need to scale back, with key principles and approaches passed on to a dedicated sales team.

So, in conclusion…

Founder-led sales can be a powerful strategy, providing unique insights, fostering strong customer relationships, and accelerating growth. By understanding its advantages and striking the right balance, companies can harness the power of founder-led sales to drive their business forward.

Growth Hacking

As the B2B landscape becomes increasingly competitive, businesses are looking for new and innovative ways to grow their customer base and increase revenue.

As anyone in the space will tell you, the best tactic for B2B growth hacking is a process – establishing and then following a plan. It’s the same process that even the smallest startup can use but much bigger than that when you’re selling to big companies.

But to begin, any growth strategy begins with a hypothesis. You must first clarify the problem that you’re working on. Ideally, you should come up with a specific, measurable, objective goal. Then, you need a plan to reach that objective.

But what is growth hacking and how does it compare to growth marketing?

What is growth marketing?

Doesn’t all marketing aim to achieve growth? 

Well, yes and no. While most marketing strategies have some kind of growth as one of their aims, growth marketing tackles this very specifically and directly compared to a typical brand awareness strategy, for example.

B2B growth marketing is a focused, revenue-driven approach with a key focus on connecting your target audience with your brand at all stages of the buyer journey. It involves intensive experimentation, tailoring and optimisation, with a laser focus on customer needs, adapting messaging and tactics quickly to any changes in customer motives and preferences.

As well as attracting new customers, growth marketing has a longer-term focus and involves customer retention and activation to drive ongoing revenue. It looks closely at all stages of the marketing funnel and uses targeted marketing activity to minimise the loss of potential customers as they move further down the funnel, thereby maximising potential business growth.

Creativity is key to this approach, and fast failure is crucial to being able to quickly identify what is and isn’t working. Growth marketing is all about experimentation, so failures are just as important as wins.

What is growth hacking?

The term “growth-hacking” was first coined by leading business growth expert Sean Ellis to describe the agile process used by high-growth companies.

Typically used by start-ups to enable rapid growth in a busy marketplace, growth hacking is all about ensuring the product is a good fit with the market. As well as marketing, it involves technical product development. While B2B growth hacking certainly involves marketing the product to appeal to the market, it’s just as much about adapting the product to fit the market’s needs.

With a target of rapid growth, sometimes seemingly at the expense of all else, growth hacking often takes an outside-the-box approach to maximising growth. It involves being highly responsive to the results of experimentation and changing tactics and product features rapidly to suit the mood of the market. This approach is generally unsustainable long term but is used to gain initial high growth when entering the marketplace.

The beginning stages of B2B growth are critical. You have to find a way to get off the ground quickly without sacrificing too much of your budget marketing an unproven product.

There are growing pains to any growth story, but there are also some incredible techniques that marketers have come up with to solve short-term growth needs in creative ways.

We refer to these types of short-term growth techniques as B2B growth hacking.

Though they are unconventional by definition, there’s a spirit of entrepreneurship and creativity behind each of the examples we’ll present today that should inspire your own growth hacking techniques.

Understanding the goals behind growth hacking and how others have approached it should also demystify the process and give you a roadmap to your own successful growth hacking.

B2B growth hacking is closely embedded in the concept of B2B growth marketing strategy.

At the beginning of your business journey, growth will be more difficult. Getting off the ground requires overcoming a great deal of inertia, uncertainty, and roadblocks.

“Hacking” this stage of growth is focused on short-term, unconventional strategies designed to kick-start your growth and ease your transition into more traditional long-term growth strategies.

To succeed you first need to understand the entire buyer journey, then bring growth hacks into play throughout the entire journey, from start to finish.

You’ll need to stay ahead of the stats as well. If, for example, you’ve generated a load of new users but they churn like mad, leaving faster than you acquire them, you’re wasting money and time.

Your best friend is the AARRR framework, which focuses on Acquisition, Activation, Retention, Revenue, and Referrals.

What drives growth hacking

You can’t know whether your growth hacking efforts are working without checking the metrics. So what numbers do you need to know to establish exactly what success actually means? Acquisition stats track visitors, bounce rates, and the time they spend on a page. Activation tracks sign-ups, feature usage, registrations, and more.

Retention looks deeply into how long customers stay with you, so the stats track essentials like the number of site visits, your email campaign opening rates, email click-through rates, and more.

Revenue stats reveal the number of paying users, the ratio of free users to those who pay, the number of initial transactions, plus your up-sell campaign results and the overall churn rate by week, month, quarter, or whatever. Finally, it takes account of referrals via tracking customer satisfaction rates and monitoring social shares.

Understand Your Target Market

The first step in creating a successful growth hacking strategy (or any marketing strategy, really) is to understand your target market.

By creating an ideal customer profile (ICP)—a description of your perfect customer—you can better understand who you are targeting, how to reach them, and how to engage with them at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Conduct extensive market research and analyse customer data to build buyer personas, which will make it easy to tailor your growth hacking strategies to specific audiences. These personas contain detailed information about different customer segments, from demographic data like age, gender, and location to data on their online behaviours.

With this target market in mind, you can build growth marketing campaigns that reach your ideal audience and are more likely to result in a purchase.

Optimise Your Website for Lead Generation

All roads used to lead to Rome. Now, they need to lead to your website.

Every growth hacking strategy will, at some point, guide prospective customers to your website. You should make it as easy as possible for buyers to engage with your website pages and to quickly find the information. Customers who visit a website with lead magnets, strong calls to action (CTAs), and a clear value proposition are more likely to convert.

And make sure you follow search engine optimization (SEO) best practices to ensure potential customers can find your business when they search for products or services like yours.

Leverage Content Marketing

You’ve heard it before, and we’ll say it again: Content is king. In fact, valuable, informative, engaging content is the backbone of successful growth hacking.

Content marketing is a two-part process:

• Content creation: Creating valuable content that educates and engages your target audience.
• Content distribution: Sharing content through social media, email marketing, and other channels.

Valuable content identifies your brand as a leader in the industry and builds trust with prospective customers and encourages them to interact with your products and services. By developing content that entertains, educates, or solves a problem for your ideal buyers, they will be more likely to share and engage with that content—increasing their chances of making a purchase.

Focus on Technical SEO

Search engines like Google penalise slow websites with broken links or missing critical technical data. How do you know if your website isn’t up to par? By using an analytics tool. This software will audit your website for technical issues and tell you what needs fixing.

Technical SEO includes adding meta tags and descriptions to web pages, adding alt text to images, identifying headers, creating an XML sitemap, improving page loading speed, and managing 404 and 301 errors.

If you optimise these items and solve any technical issues, you can get a significant boost in your search engine ranking—which means more visibility, more traffic, more customers, more revenue, and more growth.

Use Social Media for Brand Awareness and Lead Generation

Social media is a powerful, cost-effective, engaging way to increase brand awareness and generate more leads.

There are so many different types of social media products, and it seems like more and more pop up every day. LinkedIn has long been the most popular B2B platform, but your ideal customers may also be using other platforms. Based on your ICP and buyer persona research, identify the most effective social media platforms for your business and target those channels.

But having an account on different social platforms is only the beginning. If you want to build a strong social media presence, you have to post consistently and engage with your audience.

To generate interest in your social posts, share content that resonates with your audience. At the same time, comment on other posts and engage with your followers to continue building your brand’s social presence.

Implement Email Marketing Campaigns

Any B2B marketer will tell you the value of email. Why? Because no matter what websites your customers visit or what social platforms they join, everyone in the B2B world uses email.

Email marketing campaigns are cost-effective and low-effort, but it takes time to build an email list of prospects and customers. You can get buyers to sign up for your email list by offering a valuable artefact like an ebook, report, or checklist. Also, give website visitors plenty of opportunities to join, from pop-ups to prominent sign-up boxes.

Once you have a strong email list, you can create targeted email campaigns that speak to the needs of your audience. Marketing automation software has made this process easier than ever, allowing you to engage with and even personalise campaigns for various audience segments.

Everyone is always constantly checking their email. Why not experiment with how to use it to grow your business?

Develop Paid Ads

Paid ads are a strategy that includes both pay-per-click (PPC) ads on search engines like Google and social media ads. With ads that are carefully tailored to your target audience, your company can quickly increase the amount of web traffic you generate, leading to long-term growth.

PPC and social ads are also an opportunity to continue testing different growth hacking strategies. With these ads, you can experiment with different keywords, copy, graphics, features, and content. You’ll see what your visitors find most engaging and get more helpful data points for your growth hacking process.

Analyze and Measure Results

Since growth hacking relies on experimentation, it’s important to track, analyse, and measure the results of those experiments.

Metrics and key performance indicators (KPIs) reveal how these different strategies are performing—whether they are successfully driving growth or not meeting expectations. These data points and measurements will help you optimise your marketing strategies for maximum impact.

Analytics tools do this work for you. Use them to your advantage to get a better understanding of the success of all the growth hacking strategies you have in motion.

What Skills Do Growth Hackers Need?

B2B growth hacking efforts need to be creative, diligent, resourceful, and capable of determining which risks are worth the effort.

That last one is particularly difficult, but when your company is at the beginning stages of growth, it can sometimes take that extra level of brashness to get it kick-started.

A few skills every growth hacker needs are:

• Research: Growth hackers need to know their customers inside and out, so they can design hacks that will work on the psychology of their customer base for minimal cost.
• Problem-Solving: There is no problem more important to solve for early businesses than “How can we get people interested in our product?” Generating this interest will look different depending on everything from your product, business history, experience, funding, and customer base.
• Data Analysis: You’ll need to get constant feedback from your customers and business metrics to keep track of your performance. If something isn’t working, growth hackers must be able to identify this quickly and shift gears before any damage is done.

B2B growth hacking requires marketers to assess everything around the business. This assessment helps them to understand their current position and map out working strategies to move the business forward. 

The first thing to do is to retarget pages and posts. What does this mean? It means structuring your product or service around a certain group of visitors that you have already attracted but have yet to convert. This is a sub-tactic of content marketing, similar to tracking your competitors backwards. This journey starts with incredible content, like anything related to content marketing.

Your business is competing with others, and you need all the advantages you can get. This means you have to track what they are doing, and it’s completely ethical. If you choose not to do it, others are doing it to you.

It means you read your competitors’ blogs, and they do the same. Once you read your competitors’ most recent posts, you can then utilise a similar process. Once you have it down, you can even use the same topics and link formulae.

By analysing your competitors, you can outsmart them. Start a tradition – The first year is hard because you’re trying to develop traffic and build a brand. The second year is even harder because the competition ramps up even more, and you need to build on that. 

The notion of tracking your competitors is nothing new, and perhaps you already have a place for it in your business stratagem. However, most B2B growth hackers reserve it for the later stages of their marketing. Instead, it should be a core pillar of business development. It should be present and active from the very beginning.

The field of B2B growth hacking has been growing significantly in recent years. The growth is due to software, hardware, and tech becoming integral to every business across the world.

With this in mind, the ability to adapt and implement a sophisticated marketing campaign is becoming the most desired skill in the business world. 

With websites and organic marketing, companies can effectively target a niche audience through a myriad of online directories. We have come a long way. The digital marketing landscape has changed considerably in the past couple of years, leading to the introduction of new and more effective marketing.

Our Entire Workflow Model – The Rundown Of Everything Put Forward

OK, so let’s look at the entire breakdown of how we scale businesses by 3-5X in 36 months or less:

1. Analysis, Onboarding & Roadmap planning
2. Thought Leadership Positioning & Planning
3. Implementation Stages:
   1. Training
   2. Systems
   3. Sales & Marketing
   4. Onboarding
4. Growth Hacking Deployment
5. Outreach & Content 
6. Analyse and Iterate
7. Serve Demand & Scale

A Tale Of Two Paths

I hope you utilise what is in this playbook regardless of whether or not we work together in some capacity. My long-term plan is to have the UK in the top 3 of technology in the next ten years, and providing you with all this information helps me achieve that – either directly by working with you to grow your business or indirectly by providing you with everything you need to scale up proportionally. 

You have two choices, or as I like to call it, a tale of two paths. Use this information I have given you to push the business forward dramatically. I’m not going to lie, it ain’t easy to implement all this, and we have developed a lot of time and brain cells to get these processes right for our clients. 

Just be aware that it will be painstakingly difficult but not impossible. Please use the information I have put forward, and feel free to ask for any more info or guides, as we have plenty available.

If you have no desire to utilise us, I mean this when I say that I am always available to provide advice or input – your success is my #1 priority regardless of whether you are paying us.

That being said, of course, I would love to work with you. I admire what you do and want nothing more than for you to achieve your goals.

If we are to work together, well, let me tell you about the following…

Working With MarGen – Our Commitment

As I mentioned, our number one focus is to make you succeed and achieve growth and positioning that puts you on par with the industry’s leaders and cuts short your roadmap to achieving your goals with the business. 

We know our worth and abilities, and our client’s success repeatedly proves this. Whilst we do not entirely undermine our efforts with a low price tag (you get what you pay for in this economy), we structure our pricing as follows:

• A fixed monthly fee to cover our costs, allowing us to provide the services outlined within this document at break-even cost to MarGen
• We then take a percentage of the increase in profits from where you are now to our mutual target revenue goals.

Essentially, you get everything at cost, and we profit from the growth of your business within a 12-36 month contract period. 

It’s worth pointing out that the longer the contract, the more substantial the growth is. 

Realistically, for the same cost as employing a marketing manager and a sales manager, you get everything outlined within this letter – at cost.

This ensures that our costs are covered initially and then our rewards are when you see growth, which ensures that our efforts are incentivised fully in proportion to how we grow your business with you, not for you.

We situate ourselves within your company entirely and in essence, become a whole new department within your business that is designated to growth, sales and marketing.

Our Team

Our Partners

Some Of Our Clients

Course Of Action

So, you’ve got this far, which shows how serious you are. I put together this paper for two reasons. 

1. To give everyone the playbook to succeed by doing what we do
2. Separating the serious people from the time wasters

Let’s face it, only those that are serious about scaling will have gotten this far.

So, by working with us, what do you get:

• A new department committed to growth
• Ongoing Consultation
• Training
• Lead Generation Systems
• Inbound Ecosystem (whitepapers, articles)
• C-Suite repositioning including:
  • Podcasting & roundtable management)
  • Webinar programming
  • CEO thought leader positioning
• Marketing
  • Assets
  • Social media planning & Management
  • Ads (creatives + validated copy)
• Sales:
  • Ongoing training
  • Lead funnel creation
  • CRM management
  • VSL & Sales letter creation & deployment
  • Onboard commission-only team

What we offer is neither a done for you or a do it yourself service (however you are free to implement based on our literature)

This is a done with you service whereby our service is sold at cost and our team becomes part of your business. We get a cut of the revenue increase and as such, are incentivised to make your growth succeed.

And when I say we supply everything at cost, this means for the price of onboarding a sales and marketing lead, you can have everything outlined in this article for the same cost. 

This is a 3-year commitment to growth that I guarantee you won’t regret.

Due to the level of work and the onboarding involved, we can only bring on 2 new clients per month.

If you are serious about growth and want the fastest route to incredible profitability, 

Book a call with our CEO here: https://meetings.hubspot.com/leeroy1

Commonly Asked Questions