0190: Revenue Growth Engine: How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth with Darrell Amy

Ea interviews, episode 190, inspiration, transformation, success stories and the imperfect action round seven days a week. Join Mario Ficcini for today's expert authority effect interview. I am excited to bring to you Darrell Amy from Revenue Growth Engine. If you have a business and you have some profits but you want more or you have a lot of revenue but you don't have a lot of profits, these things can be misconstrued. And I have none other than author, speaker, best selling author and podcast host Darrell Amey on today's episode and I'm excited to bring him up right after we thank our sponsor. Every business needs a book, including yours. Visit freebusinessbook publishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Once again, that's free business book publishing course.

Here he is, ladies and gentlemen, Mr. Darrell Amy. Darrell, how are you feeling today?

I'm fantastic. Thanks for having me on, Mario. This is going to be a lot of fun.

Oh, I can guarantee that. And it's my absolute pleasure. You have such a great opportunity to help so many people in the service that you provide. Tell us, why is revenue growth so important to companies?

Well, it's important for any, any number of reasons. Obviously, revenue is the lifeblood of any organization. And when great things happen, when revenue, revenue grows, I love walking into a business that's growing. You can feel the energy, you can see it in people's eyes. You can just tell great things are happening. The opposite is true. When you walk into a business that's stagnant and maybe going even backwards, it's a bummer. It's a bummer. So I love going in organizations that are dynamic, they're growing. What that means is they're creating opportunities, community for new people to come to work. They're creating meaningful jobs, they're able to give back to their community. And so nothing gets me more fired up than seeing an organization that has a strategy in place, all the plans and processes to ensure that they're growing to the best of their potential.

How do you help companies that if they're, you know, like you said, if they're stagnant, you know, they might be doing okay and maybe they had some growth early on and then they just maintained. I've seen this myself and it could be a couple of years, it could be five or 10, and they're just kind of still there. How do you revive those type of companies?

Well, you know, a lot of times when you take a look at that really behind the scenes in, in those organizations, there's not really a strategy or a plan. And you know, we can all that happens to all of us in all different areas of life. You end up coasting, right, Based on what you know. And when it comes to growing revenue, what I've noticed, Mario, and, and this is, uh, just one of my big aha moments was realizing something that's actually pretty simple. There's only two ways to grow revenue. If you think about it. Um, you get net new clients or you cross sell more to your current client base. And really, at the end of the day, those are the, the only two fundamental ways to grow revenue. And what happens in most organizations when we get complacent? We lean to what we're good at. And I've discovered in the organizations that I've talked to across multiple industries, multiple sizes of business, that most companies are good at one or the other. They're either naturally good at attracting net new business, or they're good at cross selling more, upselling and maintaining relationships with their current clients. Here's what's cool. When you put processes in place to do both simultaneously, the math works out really, really well. In fact, in the revenue growth engine book, we share examples of organizations that say, you know, what if we commit to modest growth, say 10% in each one of those areas, net new business and cross selling more to our current clients, the math actually looks amazing. You get what I call exponential revenue growth, where you can actually double revenue in about 36 months if you'll show modest growth in both of those areas at the same time. And so that's what, you know, a lot of times we lean on what we're good at, what we're what we know when we get complacent, but when we get strategic, then we can say, hey, what would happen if we put plans and processes in place to do net new and cross sell at the same time? And that's where things can get really, really exciting.

Let me ask you about the other side of the coin, because that is exciting when you're doing it proper. But you know, there's the companies that are stagnant for so long. What if your company keeps growing? What are, what should you look out for if you know, you're one of the companies that says, we've been growing month over month for the last 36, 48 months.

Yeah, it's a great question. It was actually right before our conversation. I was on the phone with a technology company in the Southeast and they had Been growing year over year. And we start to have that conversation and doing quite well. We start to have that conversation about how do you set goals for growth? And what I've discovered is there's a number of ways companies set goals. Some of them are a little bit scary. Like, for example, one of the ways it's more common that then we all might want to admit when it comes to setting goals is what I call the spaghetti on the wall approach. Right? Like we had a meeting at the beginning of the year, we had to set goals for the year at the end of the year to set for the following year. And we threw a bunch of numbers on the wall and you know, and they got buried in a folder somewhere. And then, you know, at the end of the year we'll go, oh, we hit that. Or we didn't. And a lot of companies do that. I don't, you know, I think one of the reasons is they don't really have a model for setting goals. The other way people set goals is what I call the ruler approach, where you go, okay, well, you know, we did this, let's see, let's get the right. We did this last year. We grew 10% year over year, you know, and we put the ruler on the last few years of growth and then we go, okay, well, we'll commit to that next year. Well, is that realistic? Is or is that maybe the bigger question is that leaving a lot of money on the table? I think for a lot of organizations, the ruler method, while it feels good because it feels conservative, it may be leaving a lot of money on the table. So what I challenge people to do, and I'll challenge all of all of our listeners to do today is look at your company and don't just think about the big number for revenue. Go down a level deeper and think about two key drivers. Remember, we talked about net new business and cross selling more to our current clients. What are the numbers behind those? They're actually fairly simple. First is, what's the total number of clients that you have? You know, what, what, how many active clients do you have? And then the second number is what is my revenue per client? Which is actually really simple math, right? Take that first number, total clients divided from your total revenue, and you get the revenue per client. And now we've got a baseline that we can say, okay, what reasonably do you think we can do in terms of net new business, new logos, new clients coming in? And what could we do if we got strategic in terms of cross selling more additional products and Services to our current client base, what can we do to positively affect our revenue per client? And once again, if you show modest growth in each one of those areas, reasonable 10, 15% growth in each one of those areas, you get the spreadsheet out. And we actually do this with our clients. We have it on the revenue growth engine website, revenuegrowthengine.net where you can go get the toolkit and just play with the numbers inside that spreadsheet. And those two drivers actually give you what I would call aggressive but realistic growth goals for your organization.

Is there a certain percentage you should be aiming for or is there some goals you say you should hit before you try to get to another one? If someone's going, I want to go from six figures a year to seven, should they have a in between goal of 500, 600,000 before they try to jump from A to B?

Yeah, I think so. I mean, if that's, you know, a lot of those, a lot of those types of goals are kind of the spaghetti on the wall goals, right? They're the pie in the sky. I want to be X million dollars a year. Whatever your number, what would be, what.

Would a better goal be?

Well, a better goal would be to say, okay, I have 100 clients now, I think that reasonably we can grow that by 15% this year and on into the future. So, and my revenue per client is X dollars per client per year. I think we can grow that, set the goals at that second tier level and then do the math and add it up and then you can see what, what a reasonable goal is. And if you want to work that backwards and you say, I want to go from 500,000 to 500 million or whatever that number is, you can also work those numbers backwards and go, okay, well what would we need to do in terms of new client growth and revenue per client to pull that off? And I think that's where you know, a lot of companies, if you just keep it at the top line, if you just keep it at. Or a bottom line in this case, not top line revenue. If you just. Sorry, we were talking about profit earlier, Mario. If you just keep it at the top line, you miss the nuance of what's actually driving those numbers. And so the goals aren't quite as meaningful until you boil it down to net new and revenue per client. So, you know, whatever, whatever your goals are, I challenge you next time you set revenue goals to, to not just look at the total number, but go a level deeper and look at the drivers. And that's where, you know, in a lot of companies, when they do it at that level, they're surprised by the potential of their organization. You know, there was a great story about the British cycling team. And several years ago, the British cycling team was the worst team in cycling. And in fact, it was so bad that bicycle companies did not want their logo. They didn't want, like, don't buy our bikes, please, because they were that bad. And so it's a great story because a new leader came in and, you know, the Olympics is coming up, and he's like, what are we going to do? I mean, this is embarrassing. The country is embarrassed at how bad this team is. And he came in and he said, here's what we're going to do. We're going to aggregate marginal gains. We're going to look for areas where we can make a 1% difference here, another 1% difference there. They made all these changes. They changed the shape of the seat. They changed the fabric of the clothing they were wearing to reduce wind resistance. They just looked at numerous different areas. They made 1% adjustments. And his. His deal was, if you aggregate all of these marginal gains, you're going to improve. And sure enough, they won the Olympics. You know, they went from last to first. And I think the. The illustration is the same here with our businesses. You can't make changes, you know, sweeping changes right away that are going to stick and that are going to revolutionize things. But what you can do is you can say, okay, if we want to grow our business year over year, say 10% in net number of clients and 10% in revenue per client, what are the marginal gains that we could get? What are the things that we could adjust systems or processes that we could put in place that would allow us to get those marginal gains? And Mario, I think sometimes when it comes to revenue, we just think, like, big, sweeping numbers. But it's got to come down to, like, what are the realistic numbers that we can hit? What are the things that we can do inside our business to make the adjustments to ensure that we're making the marginal gains? And those things add up over time. And when you do both net new and cross sell at the same time, they compound. And the results are pretty exciting.

You are just a wealth of wisdom, and I appreciate you for sharing all of this. I got to ask you, how did you start all of this?

Oh, my. So I am a sales nerd with a marketing degree, and I started straight out of. Well, I started. I started in sales long before graduating from. From college. I was actually, as a kid, I was a son of a carpenter. And so I was actually making some lawn furniture for my parents for their anniversary when one day someone pulled over on the side of the road and said, hey, how much is that thing you're building? So I said, a hundred dollars. And they said, okay. And I was like, ah, this is good. So I got in sales and, and. But my first professional sales job was, was coming straight out of college. So I worked in technology sales, was in sales management, ran a branch, started training salespeople in 2004 when I started my first company. And as a sales trainer. Trainer. My very first client came to me and said, hey, Darrell, all this stuff you taught my sales team is fantastic. But our marketing doesn't say anything about what you just said. Do you build websites? So I said, first client, yes sir, we build websites. So I'd actually built one for a nonprofit and for my church before that. But next thing you know, I got swept into this river 17 years ago of, of marketing and digital marketing and search engine optimization and search social media and inbound marketing and account based marketing. All the different things going on out there. So it's been a fun ride. For the past 17 years, I've been very involved in sales and sales training, training salespeople, designing sales programs for global technology companies. And at the same time, I've also run a company and led a team of digital marketing professionals. And what I. Here's what I noticed. I noticed that the salespeople were obsessed with sales. The marketing people were obsessed with all the gadgets and trends. But the real goal behind both of those things is driving revenue. I mean, that's what we're, we're all about. So when I, when we would do our quarterly business review conversations with our clients and we would ask the question, you know, what are your goals right now? What are you focused on? Where are your challenges? Those just top level business questions. And over and over again, people would say, well, we need to grow revenue faster. And that's when the lights came on to say, you know what, we need to stop talking about marketing. We need to stop talking about sales. And what we need to talk about is the end result, which is revenue growth. And that was the beginning of the journey that ultimately led to the writing of the Revenue Growth Engine book and now the revenue growth workshops and strategies that we put together together for companies.

That is fantastic. Because I could just tell the more you were talking, I was like, you didn't just like roll out of bed yesterday and Just, like, make all this up. Because I could tell you had, you know, I knew you were knowledgeable even before, you know, we approved everything to book a time and all that. But the more you talk, the more impressed I'm getting.

Well, that's very kind, but, you know, it's.

It all comes down to the execution in the real world. And I think a lot of the revenue growth engine was formed out of a passion and maybe even a frustration to see things work. And right before I wrote the book, and actually what ended up kind of culminating in the revenue growth engine model, the framework that we present in the book, I was presenting at a conference on growth. And so all these. All these businesses were there. They wanted to grow their business, and half the room was full of marketing people. And the marketing people were gaga about the latest marketing trends that they were talking about. And by the way, I'm a marketing nerd. I love all that stuff. I love the gadgets, I love the technology, the platforms. All the innovation in that space I just think is amazing what's going on in the marketing world. So the marketing people were there. They were really excited. The other half of the room was sales managers. And you could see the sales managers. You could tell who the sales managers were because they were sitting there with their arms folded, lean back in their chairs, going, come on. The leads you send us are garbage. This is a waste of time. Can we, you know, can we. Can we get something that's useful? And of course, the marketing people are looking back over their shoulder at the sales managers going, y' all are a bunch of Neanderthals, right? Which you get with the program. And then the funniest thing was at the back of the room where the owners. There were several company owners, executives back there, and they're at the back of the room, and they're drinking their coffee, looking out over this landscape of people. And I know they're just looking, going, can't y' all just get along? I mean, can. Can we work together, please? And I think there's been a lot of misalignment in organizations large and small between sales and marketing. And, you know, sales is thinking about selling, marketing thinking about marketing. But really what we need to be thinking about together is revenue growth. And I think it's not a coincidence that in 2018, about 18% of Fortune 500 companies had a position called a chief revenue officer. Companies that said, you know what? This time, it's time to end this marketing and sales thing. Let's have a chief revenue officer that number jumped from 18% to 31% between 2018 and 2019. And so the trend at the enterprise level is to say, let's focus on revenue, not on sales and marketing. Let's. Let's begin with the end in mind, as Stephen Covey would say. And so we're seeing this now proliferate across medium and small organizations, even solopreneurs that go, yeah, you know what? All these gadgets and techniques and all that are great, and they have a role and they're fantastic. But let's focus on the end result, which is revenue growth. And when you do that, things start coming into perspective and alignment.

I agree. And I think it's great that you not only are sharing this and teaching it, but you have so much out there as far as assets like your book that are focused around it. Because I remember hearing long ago.

I.

Think it was my friend Chuck, he said, you know, he was asking, we were both speaking at an event, and he said, RPAs, revenue producing activities. You know, what RPAs did you do for this week? This and that. And I was like, well, that's cool. It's like, where'd you learn this? And I'm, you know, like, you're a genius. He's like, I think I got it from real estate or something. But the reality is, is you can go, you know, I sell people. I see people. I see people selling content creation courses, which is good, because if you're doing content creation, if. If you're not doing content creation, no one's seeing you. However, if all you're doing is content creation, you might not be selling. I can't tell you how many audiences I've spoke to from my books and trainings. And I go, okay, put. Give me your business cards, flyers, whatever, and let's take a look at it. And I go, where's your headline? Where's your benefits? Where's your call to action? Right, so to your point with the leads, yeah, you might get a thousand leads a day. Very good for you. Merry Christmas. But if they're all junk, you just wasted a lot of time, energy, and money, and everyone's getting irritated in the process. Conversely, if you get 10 a day and there's solid gold, who's better? What do you want, A thousand or ten?

Well, and I have some opinions about leads. So I've been in the world.

Oh, do tell.

Oh, my goodness. So I've been in the world of marketing, and I come from the B2B space. So you need to know that I'm A, you know, hard charging, B2B sales professional and all, you know, most of my marketing experience has been in the business to business world, so I'm not a great guy for consumer marketing. So if, if you're in that space, what I'm about to say probably doesn't apply to you, but in the business space, you know, what we began to realize was if you're going to drive revenue, net new and cross sell are the two ways to drive revenue. The way to accelerate revenue growth is by focusing on your ideal clients. So if you think about it, and a great question for everyone to ask, and we asked this at the beginning of all of our workshops, is who's your favorite client? You know, who are some of your favorite clients? What do you like about working with them? I've gotten to the point where I can pretty much predict what you're going to say at this point. They love working with us, they respect what we do, they value our advice, they're willing to pay for it, they pay their bills on time, they give us referrals. You know, we're like part of their team. These are the themes of an ideal client. And you know, it doesn't matter what type of business you're in, we all have ideal clients. And then I'll ask the question, question, hey, what if that client, that ideal client that you just talked about was, was to purchase everything that you offer that could help them over the next 10 years and we start adding the numbers up over 10 years and that's kind of fun, right? Because the number's usually really big and it puts into perspective what the value of that client is. And then, then I'll say, hey, by the way, what about your just average, up and down the street, bread and butter client? What would it look like if they happen to be loyal enough to you and most of them aren't to last over the next 10 years, what would that client be worth? And when you contrast the average client to the ideal client, and I've done this across multiple industries, multiple markets, multiple size companies, without fail, the ideal client is worth 20 times more or greater, 20 times or greater more than the average client client. So what does this tell me? If you want to accelerate revenue growth, focus on your ideal clients. Now that means two things. By the way, a little footnote. Sometimes people go, darrel, what about our average client? We die without those people. Well, maybe I'm not saying ignore those people, but what I am saying is from a sales and marketing perspective, that the policy in the company, the Focus should be, look, we'll take an order from anybody but 100%. Without fail, our ideal clients are going to get taken care of and our ideal prospects are going to be contacted and worked according to whatever plan we've put together so we can do business with whomever. But without fail, our ideal clients and prospects are going to get attention. So what does this mean, related to leads? Well, if you know who your ideal clients are, are, and then you develop a profile and you know who your ideal prospects are, you've literally purchased and built the list of ideal prospects. You don't need leads, you already know who those people are. What you need is engagement with your ideal prospects. And this is a huge paradigm shift for a lot of B2B sales teams and marketing teams who look at marketing like fishing. Like we're just gonna put a little lure out there. We hope something swims by and bites on it, will create this magical lead. No, it's not like that. You know who your ideal prospects are. And so the job of marketing turns from just hoping somebody, you know from swims by to saying, these are the companies that we need to engage with and we're going to figure out how to engage with the decision makers and influencers in this specific, specific set of ideal prospects. And it's a huge mindset change from, from. Yeah, just I hope that maybe somebody, you know, attract, convert close, you know, the, the inbound marketing motion shifts to more of a focused, what we call in the revenue growth engine model, outbound marketing, where we say, you know what, we know who we're going after. So we're going to develop strategies to get on their radar with a focused message that resonates with them so that we can engage with our ideal prospects, our future ideal clients.

Yeah, it's so important to be focused on that because like you're saying 20 times the leverage, 20 times the revenue, 20 times is a lot better. It's also 20 times cheaper and more cost effective to go after. You know, when people say, oh, should I go speak at this event? Should I even attend this event? Well, what if one, one event is 100 a ticket versus a thousand a ticket or 10,000 a ticket? Well, if that's where your ideal clients are, your ideal prospects, customers, how many events do you have to go to or speak at or whatever? You know, with publishing books, it's like, who are you giving them out to? There are so many things that go into it, and if you just boil away all the time, you're wasting energy and money and Everything.

I agree with you. When you have the ideal prospect, it changes everything. But the thing is, most people never take that first step and go, who is it? You know, I ask people all the time whether I'm meeting them for the first time or what. You know, generally meeting them at a event I'm speaking at in the audience, and it's like, tell me about who's your ideal prospect? Oh, I can help everyone. You're going to enjoy this. Yeah, you're gonna enjoy this a lot because you don't speak to everyone. You may be able to help everyone, but that's the differentiator. Do you have to put agents in support and, you know, doing all these extra things for everyone? No, you don't need to. That's why you have different packages and let people choose. It's not to say you don't want to help them. It's to say, hey, if you want to play at General Admission, glad to have you. If you want to play at Better admission, whatever, glad to have you. If you want to play at vip, well, that's why VIP always gets the perks. Just like first class.

That's right. That's right. Yeah. And I think for organ, I just remember being. Just remembering being at an organization in South Florida, and it was. It was this classic story. I mean, they had a product and service that could help just about any business in that marketplace. Well, guess what? There's 90,000 businesses in the South Florida area. That's exciting. Until you realize they had a sales team of six people. So you're asking each sales rep to cover 15,000 businesses. Like, okay, do the math on that. Right. If you work 24 hours a day trying to do that, it would be virtually impossible from a marketing perspective as well. You know, this business trying to market in the South Florida market. So we went through the exercise, we looked at who are your ideal clients. Then we applied that profile to the marketplace, and at the end of the day, it boiled down to about 1500 businesses. So now we've got a reasonable number. We know who those businesses are. They can be assigned to a sales rep. They built a target account program to ensure that the sales team was being managed to activity around the decision makers and influencers in those accounts. And now marketing changes their focus to go. Rather than trying to hope that somebody maybe possibly in this giant ocean of 90,000 businesses comes to us, marketing said, you know what? We're going to go to the 1500 businesses that are ideal clients and make sure we're on their radar. And you know, there's all kinds. When you start getting creative in that area, there's all kinds of ways to do that. We outline many of those in the Revenue Growth Engine book in the chapter on outbound marketing. And the idea behind that is to say, look, you know, when you know who your ideal client is, everything comes into focus. And what you need to do actually comes into focus. You can build a plan and execute that plan consistently. And you know, all of that is, all of that leads to rapid revenue growth with the type of clients you really enjoy working with, which makes business all that more exciting. There's fewer annoying clients and more ideal clients. Is a much happier thing on Monday morning to come to work for, isn't it?

Yeah, it definitely is. And the most important thing is you're getting that traction. Like you're talking about when you said 15,000 per agent, I'm like, that's crazy. But now when you break it down and it's only the 1500, you know, that comes down to between 20 and 21amonth and you only have to service 250 a year per agent. And now you can get that traction and make the progress like you're talking about. And no one's pulling their hair out because people like to be around winners and people that are going somewhere in organizations, but not at the expense of it's costing them their health and their life.

That's right. I think, you know, when you have that just broad pool that 90,000 and businesses really all salespeople end up doing is just kind of picking the low hanging fruit. But no one is strategically going after the real accounts that could make a difference. And marketing's the same way. And so when you get the focus on the ideal clients, to me that's step one of, of accelerating revenue growth really. It puts everything into, into perspective and allows you to focus your marketing, your sales efforts on the types of clients that are going to really drive business. If other clients come on board, you know, if the, if the other 85 or whatever the math is on that gives me 80, 85, 500 clients come on board and want to buy something, hey, that's fantastic. But what we do is we say our marketing efforts and our sales activity, without fail our company is going to go after these 1500 prospects and they're going to know who we are and when it comes to managing clients. So you know, however many clients you have, there's a certain number of those clients that fit the ideal client profile. Well, guess who gets the VIP treatment You know, guess who gets the periodic business reviews. Guess who gets, you know, the best benefits in your client loyalty program, who gets the best perks. And, you know, it's not that you don't like your other clients, but, you know, I'm a American Airlines frequent fire. And so American Airlines knows that I fly a lot. And so as a result, you know, I get to the front of the line, I get from time to time to the front of the plane. They take care of me because they know that I am someone that moves the needle in terms of revenue for them as opposed to, you know, casual flyer that might go on vacation once or twice a year. So is that smart? Yeah, absolutely it is, because I have a choice every time I book an airline ticket. And so I think when you look at your client base as well, you need to have a clear understanding and clear demarcation in your company of, hey, these are our ideal clients. These are our A list clients. We got to take great care of them and we need to think about the experience that they're having with our company and look for ways to improve that experience.

I want to ask you about your biggest transformation in a client. You don't need to use their name if you don't want to, but percentages and revenue growth, obviously, yeah, those help us learn who's your biggest transformation story.

There's all, you know, transformation happens in so many different levels inside this model. But I'm just gonna, I'm gonna continue with that. Since we're telling the story of the South Florida client. What, what happened inside that organization is twofold. First of all, with client management. When we went in that organization, and this illustrates what we were talking about earlier, what a lot of companies when it comes to net new or revenue growth, they're either good at net new or they're good at cross sell. And so when we came into that organization, we said, well, what, what do you want it? What are your goals? And they said, we want to drive more net new business. I said, fantastic. What, what's your goal? They said, 10% year over year year, net new growth. I thought to myself, well, that's, that's reasonable and doable. And I said, what did you do last year? They said 9.8%. Which, you know, I was like thinking they may have said out loud, unfiltered, and why are we here? You know, and then I asked, so. But that's what you know, right? If you're good at net new, you think, well, that's where we need to focus Then I asked about their cross sell business, and in this case they had a new service package that was a great fit for some of their clients, their ideal clients, for sure. They'd invested hundreds of thousands of dollars in personnel and partners to roll this program out. And I said, how's that program going? And they rolled their eyes and said, oh, geez, Daryl, you know, terrible. So I said, well, what would it look like if we put processes in place to cross sell more to your current clients? So we did that and you know, we put some very simple. We looked at the onboarding process and we came out with an, you know, they didn't have a consistent way to onboard clients. We helped them implement a periodic business review strategy where they met with their clients, in this case on a quarterly basis to talk about their business goals and additional ways they could serve the company and ask for referrals from more ideal clients. And, and then on a marketing standpoint, we put together a client communication process. And then the. They're currently rolling out a client loyalty program. Well, guess what? When you drive 10% net new and you drive 10% cross sell, this company has now accelerated their revenue growth. And they're. The amazing thing is the stuff they're doing to take better care of their clients and expand those relationships is also yielding more net new business because they're getting referrals, because they're in there asking for referrals and they're treating their customers, clients with, you know, their ideal clients with the white glove treatment, and they're happy to give referrals. So in that case, you know, you've got an organization now, their revenue is growing well past the 10% because they're getting those new clients onboarded with new programs. And you know, they're on a trajectory now to double their revenue in probably between 30 and 36 months. And, and that's without buying anybody. It's out without acquisition or anything fancy. It's just a matter of saying, hey, this is the area of business we weren't good at. Let's get good at it. And now we show marginal improvement in both net new and cross sell. And, and this, the results are exciting. So yeah, it's, it's something that any organization can do, and it requires a little bit of discomfort in saying, you know what, man, we may be great at net new business, but we're not good at cross sell. Another organization that had clients that they had literally had for 25 years. I mean, they were that good at taking care of their clients, but their net New business was in the single digits, it was low single digits. It was like just, you know, it was dismal. There were no processes there. So what are we doing? We're putting processes together for strategic prospecting, target account identification and program. They're doing an outbound marketing program. So this is very new for this company. But what's exciting is you see a company there that has an incredible track record of taking care of clients. They've just never told anybody about it. And so if they are able to maintain their client relationships and grow net new, they're going to be on a track record to double their revenue in 36 to 48 months. Months. And all without, you know, massive changes in their organization, which is really, really exciting.

Wow, that is exciting to hear because I don't know of any business that wouldn't want to double the revenue in that short amount of time.

Yeah. And it's. Once again, it sounds, you know, it sounds crazy, but when you, when. When it sounds aggressive, and it is aggressive, but when you go down a level and say, what can we do to grow net new and what can we do to increase our revenue per client? Those two things, that's where the marginal gains begin to add up and you start putting processes in place in areas where you really weren't focused before. And it's. The small things add up and make a huge difference. And, you know, I challenge anybody, you know, go to revenuegrowthengine.net, click on the free toolkit, download the growth planner, and you can see, I mean, it's a simple spreadsheet. You could create yourself. You just add that up and the marginal gains add up when you do those two areas at the same time into exponential growth, and it is incredibly exciting.

Well, I'm so glad you're sharing this with us. We are going to go to the Wheel of Whatever and come back for the imperfect action round after we thank our sponsor. So I have this here.

Oh, come on. There we go. It's the Wheel of Whatever. It always stops where I need it to, and it's always on the right question.

All right, here we go.

Oh, look where it stopped.

Look at that question. It's the best one. And it's right for you who is a company or entrepreneur, you would love to have the opportunity to work with that. You know, you could help them increase their revenue.

Oh, man. Ah, that's. So I'm going to answer that in a general sense, but I really. What really fires me up, Mario, is working with organizations that have a Generous heart. I am on the board of several non profit organizations and I've noticed that the people that the the things that really move the needle for non profits, you know these organizations, there's thousands of doing incredible things they need to be funded. Who moves the needle for nonprofits more than anyone else? It's generous business people and forward thinking entrepreneurs that have a heart to make the world a better place. So the people that I enjoy working with the most are forward thinking business people who say yeah, you know what, I want to make a profit and I certainly have have ambition for myself but my son. So that includes creating meaningful jobs for people and also giving back to my community because the world has a lot of problems that need to be solved and the nonprofits that are doing that work, they need the resources and you know, they need that. And so I get the most fired up about working with forward thinking businesses that are giving back.

Excellent. That is a great answer and I'm glad you shared it with us.

We are going to thank our sponsor and we'll be back for the imperfect action round. You've heard me say every business needs a book, including yours. And it's true. And that's why you should Visit free businessbook publishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction, lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. But you know what, don't take my word for it. Take it from a few of my authors like Lori, I went from having an idea and a possibility to actually getting my book published.

Or Catherine, thank you for making my mom number one best selling author.

Or Mary Alice what he got done for me in three days regarding my book launch.

Unmanageable John Cody I've worked with Mario.

Over the phone and online and he's been very helpful in getting me where I needed to go with promoting my books. Rocio there's no way in the world I would have been able to do this with somebody else again. I've attempted it in the past, it didn't serve me. As a matter of fact I ended up more frustrated than anything. So this has been a very seamless process. Adele if you're looking for an amazing business coach, I highly recommend Mario Ficini or Bill Benner. I can't make a higher recommendation for than to work with Mario Ficini. He has been great for me and right now I won't work with anybody else except for Mario.

Hey, their words, not mine. Visit freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com to get started now And I look forward to hearing your transformation as the next video success story. Once again, that's freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com and we are back with the imperfect action round. Darrel, are you ready to take imperfect action?

I am ready. Bring it on, Mario.

All right, we got three rapid fire 60 second answer questions. The first one is what is the fastest path to the profits?

Ideal clients. It's always ideal clients because they value what you do. And because they value what you do, you're going to be able to generate profit. And it's those, it's those bread and butter clients is up and down the street clients that grind you for a nickel every time and then they don't, then they don't renew with you. You, it's the ideal clients are going to value what you do and that's always the fastest path to profit.

Excellent. Number two, what is the biggest problem you see your prospects making in the fastest way for them to fix it today?

The biggest problem is they're talking about themselves. People don't buy products, they buy outcomes. If you think about it, you know, nobody. Harvard Business School professor Theodore Levitt walked into his classroom every year at the beginning of this, the semester and said, set, held up a drill bit. So this is a quarter inch drill bit. Nobody has ever bought a drill bit. What they bought was a hole. Don't sell the drill bit, sell the hole. The corollary to whatever business you're in is people don't buy your products, they buy the outcomes those products deliver. So stop talking about your products, stop talking about yourself and start talking about the outcomes your clients want.

Excellent. And number three, what is the best way to maximize customer lifetime value?

It's to consider the experience you provide to them. So for, you know, a long time we were in a product economy. It was all about making a better product. Then that, you know, then that kind of came of age and products became commoditized. Then we said, let's make a services economy. And so it became all about services. But guess what? Service is expected now and it's a commodity as well. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore wrote a fantastic book called the Experience Economy. And they said the new frontier is thinking about experience. So what we challenge people to do in revenue growth engine is to map your client experience. And at each stage of the prospect and client engagement, what's the client thinking? What's going through their mind? What result do you want? Where are the gaps and how can you improve your client experience? I think it's the final frontier of value creation right now. So think about the experience and how you can make it better and you will unlock value and profit.

You're awesome.

I don't know what else to say. I'm like, you're awesome.

There we go. Lightning round. That was great.

All right.

Thank you. This is great. What books have helped you in your life?

They've been. I'm a book junkie. In fact, I'm always reading and reviewing my favorite revenue books. So I mean there have, there have been. Where do I start? Outside the Bible and personally, you know, Napoleon Hill, Anything he writes is fantastic to me. But in business, I'm going to say marketing. Jay Abraham. How to get everything you can out of all you've got. What Just a fantastic. Anytime I need ideas, I crack that book open in on sales. Oh my goodness. I have shelves full of books on sales. But my favorite book right now is that I've been rereading and talking to both of the authors recently on our revenue growth podcast. And the Selling from the Heart podcast is the Challenger Sale and it's corollary, the Challenger Customer by Grant Adamson, Matt Dixon. And I think there are lessons there that are highly relevant for where we are in the market today, so. Well, that was a hard question because I could talk about books forever and of course revenue growth engine, my all time favorite bestseller.

You did. I think leaders are readers and I think one of the best things I'm glad you asked that question that sales and marketing professionals and any business owner that wants to grow can do beyond listening to great podcasts like this is to have a steady diet of ideas from great books.

You did mention a lot of great ones. I'll make sure they're on the show notes page on eainterviews.com and you didn't need to say outside of the Bible. I think that's a great one. I'm glad you mentioned at first and I didn't say business books, I said in your life.

Ah, well, there you go. Well, there's, there's, I'm going to add one more book is go for it and it's been extremely helpful to me. It's an all time favorite. I read it. That hit this book and the books by this author all the time. It's called Wild at Heart by John Eldridge and highly recommend that for any man listening or if you know a man in your life. That one has been personally very profound and helpful in my journey as a man. So yeah, books, oh my goodness, so many books. Love books and, and man, I just have thoroughly enjoyed this conversation today. What a blast.

The pleasure has been mine. I want to ask you, I'm throwing a thrown one in here. What about the five love languages? Gary Chapman.

You know, it's, it's funny because that I've, I've been, you know, I'm happily married and I think one of the reasons I'm happily married is because of the ideas in that book. So, you know, it is good. And you know, it's interesting when you, when you think about what I was talking about earlier, about the drill bit in talking about customer outcomes, essentially what you need to do in business is speak the language of your clients and your prospects, which is what they want to accomplish. And I think the same is true in marriage. You need to understand.

The language of your spouse. And I think in doing that, things go a whole lot better. It also stretches you as a human being because that language is probably going to be very different than the one that you're used to speaking. So, yeah, great book. Highly recommend that. Fantastic.

Excellent. Well, I appreciate you for sharing all that you have, all the books and everything. Where can we go to learn more?

Well, I'd love for, I'd love for everybody to go to revenuegrowthengine.net revenuegrowthengine.net has free toolkits. There's a blog we run, the Revenue Growth podcast. We're always looking for ideas and thinking of ways and angles that we can help companies, great companies, grow. And so go there, get the free toolkit, sign up for the blog updates, and we'll guarantee a steady stream of fresh ideas to help your business succeed.

Excellent. Well, thank you again, Darrell. It's been an absolute pleasure.

Mine as well. And thank you for all you're doing on the podcast. This is fantastic.

Oh, thank you very much. All right, Expert authority world. We have another great episode here today. I'll see you tomorrow. Have a great day. God bless. You're already the expert. But have you transformed your expertise into a tangible asset that will generate and qualify leads while increasing profit for you 24 7? And if so, how well are you promoting it? With the expert authority effect publishing method easier and faster than ever. Visit freebusinessbook publishingcourse.com today to learn the seven steps to publish and promote your nonfiction lead and profit generating business book in eight weeks. Visit freebusinessbookpublishingcourse.com to get started. Now, once again, that's free businessbook publishingcourse.com hey, thanks for listening to today's episode. I hope you got a lot out of it. I know I sure did. If you haven't done so already, I invite you to subscribe to the show and also be sure to check out eainterviews.com for complete show notes, the full interview video experience, links to the resources we mentioned, and more. Have a blessed day and I'll see you tomorrow.