Episode 21: The Most Effective Approaches to Rapidly Grow Revenue - Part 3

Hi everyone, I'm Ben Wright, successful entrepreneur, corporate leader and expert sales coach to some of the most talented people our amazing planet has to offer. You're listening to the Stronger Sales Team podcast where we bring together and simplify the complex world of B2B sales management. And to help the millions of sales managers worldwide build, motivate and keep together highly effective sales teams. Teams who grow revenue and make their businesses actual profits along the journey. We also provide great insights and actionable steps to managing your personal health. A happy and productive year is not only better for your teams, but everyone around you. So if you're an ambitious sales leader who wants to build the highest performing and engaged teams, stronger sales teams is right where you need to be. Welcome back to Stronger Sales Teams, the place where we provide real world and practical advice to help you develop your super powered B2B sales teams. We are two weeks in to our series on rapidly growing revenue. So week one, as a recap, was all about the best three ways to grow revenue quickly. And then in week two we had a look at the pricing strategies that help you really quickly ramp your revenue and ramp your sales in a business. Today we're going to be talking about some effective growth hacks, so some things that you and your team can do to really emphasize growing quickly. But let's recap in a little bit more detail before we get in because I think it's really important that we're across the first two sessions as they help build in to this third part of the podcast series. So week one was all about the best three ways to grow revenue quickly. We looked at three levers, long term retention. So that's getting repeat business from existing customers, which I viewed as the gold standard. And that was because acquisition costs are really low. They generally have quicker deal cycles because there's trust within your business or trust that your business will deliver. And they're less price sensitive because they know the outcome that they can expect from your product or service in the end. The reason that I think that's the gold standard is because all three of those levers result in higher margins. The second way to grow your revenue rapidly was to increase transaction size per customer. So more dollars per transaction. For me, this obviously increases your margin because you can spread your fixed costs in particular across a bigger sale. But for most businesses, they'll find there are other efficiencies they can take from that sale. And it also helps the customer be ingrained into your business with more than one service, which can increase the value that you're delivering to them. Last but not least was acquiring new customers. And I was very clear for me, this is the most expensive option. However, if you get it right, it leads into your ability to have a higher transaction size per customer and more long term retention. So it actually drives the levers of your other two ways that you can grow revenue quickly, even though it's got a high expense to start with. So really it's got that greatest potential for present and future growth. And when you get it right, it multiplies really, really quickly. So week two, that was all about effective pricing strategies. We went through eight of them and I picked five that I thought were the best ones for growth competition based pricing. So when you're entering a saturated or competitive market, you can get in there and really make sure you focus on being at or below your competitors just to build some momentum. Value based pricing, my favorite because it matches where the customer is right now, I. E. They are seeing the value that you are wanting to charge for your product, so you're more likely to get them involved with your business or service quickly. The third, penetration pricing. That's really for when brand awareness and competition is a little bit low because you can come in hard, fast, reduce the risk of a purchase for a customer, get them to try the product, and then increase pricing from there. Promotional pricing. So that's essentially high, low pricing. The reason I like this is because it could tap into a market that your existing brand may not be getting and that's the market that's a little bit more price sensitive. So you can capture new customers that you wouldn't otherwise get without having the promotional pricing, of course. Also nice to get an introduction into your brand, much like the penetration pricing strategy. Last but not least, dynamic pricing. I like this because it involved real time price changes. So your price is up and down, depending on demand, depending on time of day, depending on type of consumer purchase. But what it does is it allows you to test a whole lot of pricing models, fail fast, and then grow quickly from there. Okay, so today we're going to focus around growth hacks for lead generation. So really these growth hacks can be used for all three of your methods to grow, but they can also be used in any of your pricing strategies. I think the best focus for these growth hacks are when you're trying to really acquire new customers. In particular, I don't mind focusing on this one because obviously when we're acquiring new customers, it's giving us that opportunity to then increase transaction size and gain some long term Retention. Okay, so we're going to go through today 10 growth hacks that I think are really effective in helping you grow your business quickly. Let's get into it. Number one, and this is by far the most important for me and the most impactful, and that's getting aligned with your sales process. By now, if you've been listening to this show, you should have a sales process defined. If you haven't, step back to episodes one to six, jump onto our website, DM us on any of our social media channels and we'll send you our free resource, no obligation, that will help you actually create this. So get everyone aligned on your sales process, because then every action that you are taking as a sales leader is having an impact on a team that are all doing the same thing. If they're off running their own sales processes or variants of your sales process, then the activities and the actions that you take have a reduced multiplication effect. So one action might get to 50% of your team rather than one action getting to 80 to 90% of your team. So super important because it creates terrific efficiency and efficiency allows you to grow quickly. Number two, the message that you're getting out to your customers, it needs to be repeatable. So it's a cookie cutter message or approach, but must have personalization. So if you can standardize the majority of your process but still have customers feel that they have a personalized sales approach, what you're doing is you're getting out to more customers more efficiently. Same as with your alignment around a sales process is it allows you to do more with less time. When we get to number four, five and six, I'll talk about some of the tech you can use to actually embrace personalization. But for the moment, we need to make sure that our messages and our systems and everything we're doing is a cookie cutter or a process driven approach that will allow us to efficiently get out to all of our customers. I'm sure we've all worked in businesses where we see some of the most successful team members are allowed to do their own thing because they're good at their job. That can work really well when you're in a business that has a more mature base or when you're looking to grow at more moderate level, single digit and even low double digit revenue. But when you're looking for really fast growth, we need everyone on the same page because otherwise you just have far too many streams of linear deviation and you don't get the messages out there or you don't actually have the serviceability of the number of leads that you're trying to target. Okay, so number one was get aligned on the sales process. Number two was make sure your message is cookie cutter or systemized with a level of personalization. Number three, this one for me drives lots of debate, but I like it when lead generation responsibilities, and I've seen consistently across teams that when lead generation responsibilities are leveled out between sales and marketing, the best teams we work with, they go somewhere near that 50, 50 mark. Half marketing, half sales. Now I will say that does exclude businesses that deal in lots of small transactions at high volume. Right? So we put that to the side. If you're a high volume, small transaction business and generally your marketing team are going to be generating most of those leads because your sales team just doesn't have time to do so. But if you're a team that works in five $10,000 plus three to five million dollars type of deals, having your sales team have a heavy investment in generating their leads really drives success and sales growth. Why? Why does it have an impact when your sales team are generating leads themselves? So for me, sales teams place greater accountability on themselves when they've self generated a lead for whatever reason, right or wrong. They feel a greater accountability when they have made a relationship or a contact with someone directly. It also helps them appreciate marketing leads more because they know just how hard it is to get out there and prospect and find a lead that when they're given leads, they tend to give them a lot more of their time and their focus and make sure they deliver. Second reason is using the sales team to generate leads actually personalizes the process even more by having someone there face to face and actually having the generation of the lead. So as a customer, if the first person you deal with or talk to is the person you see through the entire consultation journey, there's a greater level of personalization and relationships built. For me. Next one, referrals increase often as a result of that because you have a greater relationship post the sales process, the salespeople are not only more likely to ask for referrals, but they're more likely to get them because they've built a stronger relationship with their customer. And last on this one is it actually widens the net. It allows your business to try more generation type activities or wider type of activities that often will help you recognize that maybe what you're doing can be tweaked or improved or adjusted to be better than what it was. Okay, so that's number three, balancing out lead generation responsibilities. Number four, five and six, this is the stuff that starts to get really exciting. Number four, we must be embracing tech to prospect. Our sales lives have changed like nothing I've seen certainly in my career. I'm 25 years in. The current technological advances that are coming through the pipeline are huge. It's the elephant in the room in every conversation. But we must now be embracing tech to prospect if we're looking to grow fast. So what I'm going to go through now is a few ways you can actually embrace tech to prospect for your teams. Right, some nuggets here. So if you haven't got a pen out or if you're multitasking, come back to me. You want to write some of those down? All right, let's start nice and easy. A tool like LinkedIn Navigator. We had a chat with Colin Mitchell about three or four weeks ago and his remark was if your business isn't using LinkedIn navigator, leave, go and find another now. Pretty strong words, but certainly I agree that LinkedIn Navigator has a very powerful place in the sales team day to day operations because it gives you such a great ability to not only target prospects but also do your research on them. If you can add in some form of automation with this. And now LinkedIn is pro some automation and they're certainly against some automation. I've seen plenty of people use something like a duck soup that allows them to actually automate their targeting of customers and what happens is that they then have not only the connection requests, that there's a process or an automation funnel that happens after they connect. Fantastic way to nurture leads and it involves very little use of time. Once you get it right, of course, important that you test, prove and roll out how that's going to work for you next. One, Add video to your mix. If you're not using video in your sales teams, I'm going to say you're now behind. There are so many platforms out there that allow you to do this. You've got Loom that allows video or even just voice recording. You've got videoast that allows interactive questions to be posed to customers. There's Pictory, there's Synthesia. There are so many ways that you can get out there and add video into your mix. I think you're missing a beat if you're not doing it now because it allows you to prospect on scale and then grow your revenue faster. Target your ideal customer. Embracing tech will help you target your ideal customer. Have a look at humantic AI. It's a tool out there that will Improve the accuracy of your prospecting and again allow you to get to more of the right people that you want to deal with. Creating content. If you're not embracing tech to creating content. In fact, if you're not creating content as a salesperson, again, I think you're missing a huge opportunity. But more importantly, it's so easy to do so now, but you're getting it out to a wide net of people that allows you to build the database that are aware of you. And again, the more people that know about you, the more likely you are to have some fast growth. There's lots of tools out there that will allow you to repurpose and automate your posts. Things like hootsuite for an example is one that I'd check out. All right, next part of embracing tech to prospect. If you want to grow fast, get savvy with people that are visiting your website. It's not just about filling in forms anymore. There's ways you can provide value on your website that is scalable. You can map how people use your website. So there's tools like hotjar, for example, that are out there and will help you map customers who don't even connect with you after being on your website. But if you can add value in your website resources, content, podcasts, then what you're doing is you are firm, placing yourself into the customer's mind when they're researching what they're going to do next. We know that getting face to face time is getting harder and harder. So if you can be improving your contact with customers outside of these times, then you're ahead of your competition. Last on embracing tech to prospect is make sure you've got really quick responses to leads. So if we're not using CRMs, then we are a long way behind, but many businesses do. But we need to make sure that those CRMs are mobile compatible and that we're getting to our salespeople wherever they are salespeople, they work from a large number of locations. So we need to be able to take leads to them in a form that will allow for quick responses. Very, very clear. The faster you respond to a lead, the more likely you are to close. Okay, that's number four, embracing tech to prospect. Number five, we need to embrace content to then build a following. So we've embraced tech to prospect, now we want to be embracing content to build that following. So social centered selling, they'll tell you that 70% of salespeople that use social media in their process outperform their peers who don't that's a big number. And for me, I was already there. But pretty compelling to say get out there. If you're a salesperson or as a sales leader, make sure your team are podcasting or they're guesting on podcasts, or they're using social media or your marketing team is helping them access social media. Salespeople aren't always the most tech savvy operators. Right, sorry. I'm sorry to put that out there, but I work with plenty of them and we work with plenty of them and their skills are not necessarily required to be around tech. So sometimes we need to give them a little bit of help to be able to embrace content to build a following. Okay, so that's number five. So number four, five and six are quite closely related. So first we're embracing tech to prospect, then we're embracing content to build a following, but then we're again embracing tech to shorten our sales cycle. So how do we do that? One of my favorites is when you're booking appointments with customers. Lead comes in, appointments booked. Use that gap between the appointment and the meeting, whether it's an hour or a day or a week, to build your brand, both your business brand and your personal brand. Find a way that you can get the customer learning more about you, learning more about your business, or doing their research with your brand in mind. Right, so how do we do that? Big one for me is using videos to provide introductions afterwards. Get people out to industry tools if you can. So reference some tools. And I've quoted this business before, but a fantastic business in the sustainability world that I work with actually had an online self diagnosis tool. So if this business is able to then take that tool, put it in front of their customers between the meeting being set and the meeting being conducted, then they're going. A terrific way to building some brand equity. Get the salesperson building their own relationship with a customer with the pre video. I mentioned this just a minute ago. It's so easy to create a generic video that goes out to customers to then use a resource to improve the audio, improve the video quality and edit it for you and get that out to customers to introduce yourself every time. So, so easy. Get your storytelling on point. Write pre prepare with something like tome great product to help you shorten your sales cycle by embracing storytelling. Get your presentation tools on point. If you don't have great presentation tools in your business, there's lots of software out there like Shuffler, S H U F L R for example, that will help create your own presentation. Decks use appointment reminders with customers. They can all be automated. Now make sure your customer attends the meeting and give them something to think about before they get there. And equally as important, once you've finished your appointment with customers, you can have some automatic follow up that happens straight out of it. Calendly's fantastic at it. Really easy tool to use, gives reminders, sends follow up and really allows you to build that connection with customers. So 4, 5 and 6, all about embracing tech and content to not only prospect, but build a following and shorten your sales cycle. Okay, number seven, last one here on Tech, embrace it also to increase your close rates. So my favorite is once you're out in front of a customer, you've presented to them, you've done. Everything we spoke about in number 4, 5 and 6 is then what do we do once the meeting's finished? For me, if you can, seed out across that organization, because many B2B decisions are made by more than one person, we need to make sure that we're getting our brand, our product, our service, and even our individual personality out across that organization. So use tech, use LinkedIn, use social media, use. There's lots of tools out there to get yourself known to other people in the business. LinkedIn Navigator, really easy way to do it because you can profile the business and send out lots of connection requests, right? Terrific way. If you can see it across an organization, then people know you before the decision is made. And when they know someone, they're more likely to trust them, have some credibility with them and the decision go their way. Video messaging or other types of follow up. Especially when you know that someone in a business has to engage with others to make a decision. So for me, a classic example here is have your presentation work on a tool like Loom, run a video that talks through that quotation and send it to your contact at whatever business you're working with. Right? If your customer can be trained to present your offer in the best possible way, then it's going to come across as a more qualified, a more competent or more trusted offering for the customer and the decision makers when it gets to them. So use video or messaging to follow up, especially when you're training the trainer. Last but not least here, use technology to meet the customer where they're at, right? Work out what's the modality for communication that your customer likes best. Is it text message? Is it phone call? Is it video? Is it email? The vast majority of those you can automate and you should be able to set up automation for all of those modalities in your business. So once you've finished your presentations with your customer, you can be communicating with them in the way that they like best. Okay, number seven. Number eight. Training, training, training. If we want fast growth, we need to make sure that our teams are competent so that we're presenting to our customers and we are not burning leads. Okay, add in a little bit of coaching once you've done the training. In fact, add in a lot of coaching and teams competence grows fast. So if training and coaching is not at the top of your list and you're wanting fast growth, add it in there straight away. Second last, number nine, mindset. Lead by example. Whatever you want your team doing when you need fast growth, they need to have very short circuit feedback loops. So if they're seeing you as their leader, do it, they are much more likely to embrace it and embrace it quickly. It's hard to lead by example. However, it's so important as a leader in these stages of fast growth that we do so. And last but not least, everyone likes winning. We need to make sure that when we have wins, we celebrate them because winning builds winning. So find a system, a symbol or a norm. Find a way that you can celebrate, whether it's in deal review meetings, whether it's by announcements. I love that old fashioned ringing of the bell. There's just something fantastic about associating sound or an action or a symbol with winning a deal. And really make sure we're celebrating that and learn from what we're doing well in those deals because winning absolutely builds more winning. Okay, so final word on this before we move on is we've only really scratched the surface today on growth hacking. There's so much more we could uncover. But for now, of those 10 things up there, if you can take two or three of them and roll them into the business, you're doing fantastically well. There's a lot in there and it takes a lot of time to roll out, but pick two or three and see how you go. If you start building momentum, momentum will follow, right? It's like winning follows winning. Just build momentum to get your fast growth happening. It's a skill, it needs time. Building momentum is not easy. But embrace the uncertainty, lean into it and let's see how you go. Okay, so there you have it. That's part three of our revenue series, which was focused on achieving fast growth. We've gone through three really chunky episodes there. If you haven't listened to all three, I'd suggest you get back and Go through them because there's plenty of information in there. Next up, we're going to have a terrific guest who's really well versed on how to determine if our campaign so our fast growth campaigns for example, actually working. His name's Mark Stauss and he's the CEO of Proof analytics, so get ready for him in a week's time. That said, if you weren't able to capture everything from today, please jump onto the show notes in your own time. They're also on the website strongestsalesteams.com and you know how to contact me if you need a little bit of extra help. Get us through any of the social media channels, particularly Instagram and LinkedIn. We're StrongersaleSteams and we'll make sure we get in touch with you. But before we leave today, our health and wellbeing tip. Age old question. What's better, being kind or being nice? What's better for your health and those around you? For me, I've always wanted to make sure that I am kind ahead of nice. Being kind doesn't mean you're always nice. Being kind sometimes means having hard conversations with people because you know that it's the kindest thing to do for them. Being kind sometimes means that people exit your business. Being kind sometimes means that people move into different roles in your business. Now, unfortunately, being nice doesn't generally lead to those types of conversations or actions because you're constantly focused on being nice to someone and not hurting their feelings. Sometimes being kind involves hurting people's feelings, but it's the best thing for that person and for you long term. So for me, I sign up to being kind over being nice every day of the week. Until next time. Keep living in a world of possibility and you'll be amazed by what you can achieve. Thanks everyone. Want to be kept up to date with any of our free materials to help you build the best sales teams possible? Well, the easiest way you can do so is to follow us on your favourite social media channel. We're onger sales teams on most of them and if you DM us stronger, we'll send you right back some great resources to help you build your super powered sales team. If you'd like a little more help, please get in touch directly and book a free discovery call with me. I run a limited number of these sessions and they're free for my podcast listeners. I'd love to help you out. Until then, see you next week for another podcast of stronger sales team.