Paving Your Road to Revenue: Part 1

Hey LinkedIn, Dacia Coffey here and welcome to Wednesday!

This is the written edition of my weekly series called, Corporate Caffeine.?Today's focus is on?Paving Your Road to Revenue

FYI - I host this series live on?Facebook?&?LinkedIn, post these episodes to?YouTube, and have a bonus?podcastcovering a lot of this content and more.?

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So, let's jump right in!?

Paving Your Road To Revenue: Part 1

(Watch the full video here)

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Hello, everybody! Welcome to a five-week series on building a road to revenue.

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During this journey, I will share what we're doing for some clients and how we are advising them. We want to help other people accelerate their financial prosperity, as well as their business growth.

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This five-week journey is about paving your road to revenue. The cool thing? There are gifts, too! We put together a ridiculously amazing comprehensive kit designed to give you super immediate action items for?how to generate more revenue starting immediately.

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Of course, this kit is tactical and is infused with everything we've learned as a small business in eight and a half years and how we've gotten to where we are.

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My one caveat?

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If you have read?Corporate Caffeine?before, you know what's coming. Of course, we're talking about revenue growth, but it is never divorced from or separated from the responsibility that all of us have to impact and influence positively. Before you issue an invoice, it is up to you to create a business world full of meaning, connection, and prosperity for all.

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Marketing and sales are one of the most under-leveraged, underutilized opportunities that you have to change the world.

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It is shocking and mind-blowingly exciting what kind of ripples you can send cascading through the business world and into everyday life.

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It's exciting because opinion marketing is about connecting people who do not know each other yet to solve problems.

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At its core, that's what marketing does.

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It connects intelligent people to intelligent people to meet needs and desires.

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I will tell you it can be tough to take your own advice. To do so, I've heard you have to pretend that?you're talking to your best friend and ask yourself what you would tell them if they faced the same challenge.

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I hired a coach to give me some space inside my selling processes. Now, today, I'm surrounded by a lot of brilliant sales trainers and sales leaders, and I love this. There's so much honor in salesmanship, especially when it's done with integrity.

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What Hiring a Coach Did for Me

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First, hiring a coach clarified where the blind spots inside my sales process existed. Then, with his help, I changed our sales cycle from an average of six meetings and follow-ups to two and a half. That process continues today, and cutting waste out of that business development cycle was huge.

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Second, hiring a coach helped me stop wasting my customer's time. It helped me focus my meetings and get better results.

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Third, it allowed me to close more businesses because I was more effective in those sales conversations.

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Here's the irony:

I was having six meetings because I was thinking too much about myself. When I got efficient and started deeply listening and tuning in to what my prospective customers were saying, all the bloat disappeared. I didn't need all those extra meetings.

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So, not only did hiring a coach change the trajectory of how effective we were at bringing in new clients, but it also helped us be better at living our mission inside of our business development process.

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That felt amazing. So, how did we do this? It's come up numerous times for other clients.

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Cutting Waste From Your Process

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One of the things we see is that clients have never really thought about their actual sales process.

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They never used their CRM and customized their sales process. They've never outlined the steps — including the emotional steps — to get a prospect from stranger to customer.

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That's something we look out for frequently, depending on what problems we're hearing when we're working with our clients.

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So, how do we do this?

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How do we cut waste from your business development?

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First, I want to talk to you about marketing waste in general. We often see marketing vomited all over everything — too much collateral in too many places.

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So let me just cut through all of the marketing jargon and tell you the most basic rules you need to know:

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Go where your buyers are.

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It's simple. If your buyers are not on Facebook, don't go there. If your buyers are not on LinkedIn, don't go there. It doesn't matter if you're posting right if your clients aren't there.

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You have to go where they are, then use the right words to describe their problems. This means finding out where they get their information and trustworthy sources.

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This enables you to cut waste, which is so important. Waste is killing the effectiveness of your marketing campaign and your team's ability to do their best work.

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One of the ways you can control waste?

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Make sure you are paying attention to where you are being fear oriented and illogical in your spending, helping you cut waste.

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Furthermore, don't look at your competition and follow them. No. Go where your buyers go. If you have done all the work and know where your customers are, chances are your competition is wasting time, effort, and money.

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Keep tabs on them, certainly. But don't copy them. You can't see their analytics, and you don't know if what they are doing is working.?

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Slow Down to Speed Up

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Yes, I mean that. Slow down to speed up. Go deeper instead of wider.

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Many years ago, I realized there was no way I could stay on top of all the platforms like Instagram. At the time, most of my buyers were not on Instagram. They didn't have YouTube.

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They didn't have Facebook. So, I doubled down on LinkedIn. I picked one because our research and strategy showed where they were, so I spent my time, money, and attention in the places they were at.?

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We didn't do those other platforms early on. Now, we have since added and championed different things, but at the time, I doubled down on LinkedIn.

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To this day, it remains one of my most significant sources. To get it right, you have to plan. You have to use it consistently, and then you've got to have that patience to harvest it as an increasingly powerful channel.

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No matter which one you use, double down.

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Use the best practices you've learned with time and attention. In doing so, you have freed yourself up to look at what's working and kill what's not.

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The other place where slowing down to speed up is essential is follow-up. I see massive waste at companies of all sizes in the lack of follow-up.

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So, let's say you launch something worthy of download, and people download it. If nobody does anything with all the leads that are coming in, if there's no nurture, there are no email campaigns written, you've failed.

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You've failed because you did not build an ecosystem.

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A lot of work and preparation needs to go into prepping for a trade show, a remote event, an ad, anything.

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This is necessary to be successful in nurturing. You have to ensure that you have pre-built and pre-planned follow-ups and hold people accountable for this work.?

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If you get leads from a trade show, you have to have clear outreach to those leads. You have to use the trade show to its maximum effectiveness.

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Are you saying something interesting and worthy? Are you actually utilizing these leads?

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The other thing is to look at your data. If you don't like data, find someone who does. You don't need to be an analyst to sort all of it.

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Data is supposed to help ask intelligent questions.

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Those smart questions encourage better collaboration on your team and with any partners that you have in business development. From there, you can find the action items that can move and increase your effectiveness.

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In other words, you must move your entire team into a place of continuous improvement. Slow down. Find out what's working.

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This is a common problem for companies all. Let me repeat that: Of all sides. People have no idea if what they're doing is working or if they don't hold their teams or themselves accountable.

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Then, these ideas stall, and team members watch numbers like the revenue number crash. Well, duh. If you haven't launched anything new and can't track progress, you're not going to know what works and be able to tell how it works.

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A lack of follow-up is a massive, massive waste.

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You are all probably doing so much work to generate leads, but if you don't work those leads, it doesn't matter. For example, did you really qualify them?

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Did you really follow up on every possible thing? Are you really maximizing what you're doing and what's right in your lap?

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The Paradigm Shift

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I teased this one earlier in the article and now want to go more into it.

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When it comes to your sales cycle, I want you to imagine you are a partner in the buying process. You are not somebody on the opposite side of the table that is involved in the selling of something.

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This means you must listen deeply and intently to your potential customers.

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You have to have pre-planned each meeting. You have done your research and are walking in their shoes.?

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From your first meeting, you are crystal clear on the problem they are trying to solve. You're being honest about whether or not you can solve that problem. If you can, you give them examples.

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Then, you tell them stories about that outcome and advise them on how to solve their issue. Imagine that you were talking to your best friend. What would you say to them if they came to you with that same problem?

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This can be a significant paradigm shift and one that changes your sales process.

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You've got to be very good at questioning.

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You've got to go to the deep end faster, and you've got to help your client see whether there is a business case for solving this problem or not. If you are walking with integrity, you can cut out a whole bunch of waste.

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More to the point, you can tailor your message and customize your solution to exactly what they need.

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You can't talk about yourself or your case, and that does not help someone have an "aha!" moment about themselves. Instead, partner with them. Ask about their buying process.?

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This is all about eliminating waste

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I know salespeople who are so exhausted by the process that they quit trying to solve it.

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In a conservative leadership position, you should not allow that to happen in the sales position. You need to care more about their outcomes than you care about yours.

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Let me give you an example from this past week. I spoke to a small business owner with an amazing platform. He's created some incredible success with his military job finder. He wants to expand his business and has a healthy budget.

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We were looking at the low-lying fruit he had in front of him to cut waste from his business development cycle, but I was concerned that we were not the right fit because there was some obvious stuff they could do.

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So I told him the truth to help him make a better decision. Since then, he's come back two times.

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I did this because I care more about a business stewarding its resources wisely so it can use its fantastic vision. I care more about their significance and success in this world than about landing them as clients.

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I always tell people — explicitly or implied — that I want to end every single sales scenario in one of two ways: With a friend or a partner.

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Guess what? Both of those are winning.

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To get here, you've got to flip that paradigm, and you've got to choose impact over invoice. If you truly have a servant leadership culture, this desire to unleash it, and limitless thinking regarding how you could change the world, you bring honor to salesmanship.?

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I know that's a mouthful, but I want you to make that shift. Do it for your own heart and your prosperity. I want you to find out what it feels like on the other side.

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By doing so, you will create acceleration in your personal success and your revenue success. More to the point, when you are deeply listening, it is incredible how people tell you about themselves.

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They will tell you exactly how to help them and what they need.

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So obviously, as you can tell, I get excited about this stuff. There's so much opportunity, but you must remember that this is a headspace thing. Slow down to speed up. Go deeper instead of wider.

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You've got to earn the right to go wider. Be thoughtful about your sales process and whether or not you can implement clear and actionable ways to help a customer. Think through changes you can make to bring servant leadership to your business, and use it as a differentiation strategy.?

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Make sure to have a big, fantastic week. Remember the old expression:

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The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago.

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The second-best time to plant a tree is right now.

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Find the action steps you can take right now to launch your ideas and to go bigger in your potential and impact.? Onward and upward!

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