Revenue Growth Strategies for Business Success – ep 126

Mostafa Hosseini  00:02

In this episode, you will discover how you can experience exponential growth. The key to selling in an uncertain market and why companies don’t need leads. My guest today is Darrell Amy. Welcome, Darrell.

Darrell Amy  00:19

Hey, it’s great to be here. This is going to be a lot of fun today. Absolutely.

Mostafa Hosseini  00:23

I look forward to our conversation. And we are talking about exponential revenue growth. So hang tight, and listen in, put anything that you’re doing aside, including social media, and anything else, tuning and make sure you like and subscribe to the channel and shared link with a friend who could benefit from exponential love revenue growth, which could be about all of your friends.

And then if they’re established, and they were always looking for growth. That’s right. And then if you have any questions about what we’re doing, put them in a comment and or send it to us later. And the other thing you could do is tag your friend on social media and comment and have them enjoy this conversation and share the Wisdom with them.

Let me do the proper introduction to my frail friend, Darrell, and we’re going to dive into a very interesting conversation. Darrell AMI helps generous entrepreneurs build engines to grow revenue so they can grow their impact. He’s the author of revenue growth engine, how to align sales and marketing to accelerate growth. He leads the build your revenue growth engine, and mentorship program and is also leading a group of entrepreneurs to Everest base camp with the revenue growth expedition.

That is awesome. Darrell serves on the Forbes Business Council. He is the host of their revenue growth podcast and the co host of selling from the heart. What he is not helping companies build engines to grow revenue. He enjoys hiking, canoeing, and sailing. Welcome, Darrell.

Darrell Amy  02:07

Hi. That was fantastic. It’s great to be here. We’re gonna have a good time today.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:12

Absolutely. We’re about are you? Well,

Darrell Amy  02:14

I’m a Canadian kid that married a southern girl. So I live right on the south edge of the Ozark Mountains in the great state of Arkansas. Smack dab between Dallas Texas in Nashville, Tennessee.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:25

Oh, yeah. And which city are you in right now?

Darrell Amy  02:30

Conway Conway, Arkansas. Yep.

Mostafa Hosseini  02:33

And then what’s what’s the what’s it like? Right now? Is it warm? Is it cold? Is it

Darrell Amy  02:38

Yeah, I’m glad you asked because my Canadian Blood usually does not like this southern hate. It’s been three decades and barely used to the heat. But today, as I look out the window in my office, there is snow on the ground. So this happens once or twice a year. And so I’m that I’m a happy Canadian kid finally enjoying some cool weather in the South.

Mostafa Hosseini  03:02

Oh, yeah. Don’t we get some snow up here. It is literally snowing right now in Calgary, but that the streets have been covered in snow. Pretty much all January. But you know what we’ve had like almost the best January ever.

Darrell Amy  03:19

Now make no mistake. By Saturday it’s going to be 18 degrees. The sun will be shining. Everything will have melted and gone away so we don’t keep snow very long down here. It’s a year round golfing place and there’s no skiing or snowshoeing in this part of the world. But it is great place to live. So

Mostafa Hosseini  03:42

that’s not Calgary. Snow stays around. Long. We’re not a golf community like in the summer it is for two weeks. Skating and skiing and snow and Winter Wonderland is what we call it. So, Darryl, what is your story?

Darrell Amy  04:00

Well, I mentioned on that Canadian kid that married a southern girl I came down here and went to business school and got a got a degree in marketing. And in the process felt like the fastest way to get get started and to get out and make some money was to get into sales. So I started my career in technology sales three decades ago. This year it’d be that was 1993. For me, I was a sales rep sales manager ran a branch went to work for Japanese technology company helping them develop their network across the region.

And in the process had always wanted to do something on my own. So in 2004, I hung out a shingle starting a sales training company teaching solution selling skills. And as luck would have it, because staff on my very first client came to me and said, and that sales training was great, but our marketing doesn’t say anything about it. Do you build websites? Yes. Sarah, we build websites, I took that marketing degree out of my pocket.

And what was fun about that is I’ve spent the last two decades I guess, to use our skiing analogy with one ski in the marketing world. I’ve run started and been a part of several different digital marketing agencies, starting with that web and then going into Search Social inbound, and now Account Based Marketing. And then the other ski has always been sales and passionate about selling. I’ve gotten involved in doing sales training across multiple industries have the opportunity to develop sales training programs, for some fortune 100 companies.

 And right now my passion, I get to co host the selling from the heart podcast where we get to talk to the leading authors and thought leaders in the sales business along with my co host, Larry Levine, author of selling from the heart. So I am a I’m a sales guy with I love selling, I love that whole world of sales. And I love marketing. It’s always interesting. It’s always new, there’s always something to learn. It’s always challenge. And so that brings me to where I am today. And I was getting ready to speak at a conference in 2019.

And it was a conference with usually when I spoke to groups, it was either a group of entrepreneurs, business owners, a group of marketing people are a group of salespeople, but in this conference, they were all in the room together. So what am I going to tell these people? So, you know, the marketing people were there, they were excited. They were sitting on the edge of their seats, the sales leaders were in the back of the room, you could see him kind of rolling their eyes come and we could be out selling something.

Why are we at this conference, the business owners were drinking coffee around along the back row, and you could see them going. And I wish y’all could get along. And I was like, What am I going to say to this group of people, some of them had been down, far down the inbound marketing road. And maybe we’ll get to this later on the conversation. But it didn’t work very well for them. And others had not, you know, done anything.

But there was, it was just one of these times where I woke up in a sweat in the middle of the night going, what am I going to tell this group, I can’t go in and say you need to get involved in inbound marketing, because some of them had done it. And it wasn’t the right solution for them. So in that dark night of the soul, I started with a clean whiteboard. I love a clean whiteboard. And I sketched out the revenue growth engine model, which is a framework to align sales and marketing to drive exponential revenue growth, kind of just after two decades of frustration to sit down and go, Okay, I started from scratch. This is what I do.

Mostafa Hosseini  07:53

Love it. And then who do you serve these days? And who do you Who do you want to work with?

Darrell Amy  07:58

I love serving, as you said at the beginning of the show, purpose driven generous entrepreneurs that want to scale their business. And the reason why I say purpose driven and generous entrepreneurs, is they’re the type of people that when they grow their business, not only are they creating meaningful jobs, and by the way to all of our friends in marketing, you know, don’t everyone, don’t ever let anyone put you down, you’re on the front edge of creating growth and meaningful jobs right now, which is so important.

But not only are generous entrepreneurs creating meaningful jobs are also giving back to nonprofits and and causes that they value. And right now is, as in various parts of the world. There’s different levels of economic uncertainty, I think it’s really important that generous business owners are able to step up and fund these critical causes. So that that’s what gets me up in the morning. I love sales. I love marketing, but I really love seeing generous entrepreneurs thrive so that they can give back and that’s what gets me fired up.

Mostafa Hosseini  09:08

Love it. So we talked about sharing some tips about creating exponential growth. Okay, let me let me go back actually before so you taught you set you went you sat down and you said here’s what I would do. If I started from scratch, yes. What do you do when you start from scratch? Or what did you decide to do? Well,

Darrell Amy  09:31

the first thing I decided to do is to realize that it’s not about sales. And it’s not about marketing, what it’s actually about is revenue. And so you know, inside any type of organization, no matter if you’re a massive company or startup, it always seems like sales and marketing are bumping heads. And sometimes there’s silos and all of that. Sales has its own language marketing has its own language. But the reality is, it’s is not about marketing. It’s not about sales, it’s about driving revenue. And specifically, it’s about driving revenue to ideal clients.

And what I mean by ideal clients, my definition, an ideal client is someone that needs everything that you offer, the type of client that it’s not one and done. It’s, you know, we, we don’t close deals, we open relationships, and those relationships keep paying off over time. And so when we look at at the goal is revenue, and the goal is driving revenue from ideal clients, I’ll explain in a moment why that’s important. That whole model, the revenue growth engine said, this isn’t a sales model. This isn’t a marketing model. This is a revenue model.

And I think it’s really important to use that word, I think the R word is showing up more and more inside companies, you’re seeing Chief Revenue officers, you’re seeing companies say I want a revenue operations team, because what we want to do is want to make sure we don’t get our eye off the ball and the ball is revenue, and how do we grow? How do we grow the top line of our companies?

Mostafa Hosseini  11:12

Love it. So you say it’s not about sales and marketing, it’s about revenue. What do you mean by that? Well,

Darrell Amy  11:20

I want to make sure that sales and marketing are pointed in the same direction. You know, the the subtitle of the book is aligning sales and marketing to drive exponential growth. And this whole concept of alignment, I had an epiphany one day when I was taking my car to the shop, and we’ve all had a car that’s out of alignment, right, you’re driving down the roads pulling to the left is pulling to the right.

All that it’s very, very frustrating to drive a car that’s out of alignment, it’s also very, very frustrating to work in a company that’s out of alignment. And so the challenge is, you know, you’ve got sales headed in one direction, and you got marketing heading direction, one direction, you’re going to be in trouble.

So when when I brought my car to the shop to get in alignment, I noticed they lifted up on the rack. And in the old days before all the fancy computers and lasers and everything actually had a red.on the back wall. And all the tires got pointed at that red dot, the machine, you know was focused on one thing, and when that happens, all sudden the tires in alignment, you can drive down the road and hit the gas and you can go and, and so the alignment point that I think is really important for sales and marketing, because we tend to get stuck in our own worlds is if we can get both teams.

And really every department in the company focused on revenue, then we begin to get everyone working in the same direction. So it’s not like you know, sales is pulling to the left marketing’s pulling to the right sales is going on an appointment. I had someone Someone tell me this the other day, a salesperson when I’m this appointment there with a financial institution that’s kind of a great marketing team. He goes, I go on this appointment, my customer hands me something and says, yeah, just got this from your marketing.

I just forgot this from your company, the marketing department put it out, can you tell me about it salesperson didn’t even know about it, who well there’s this is out of alignment. So if we keep the goal, the red.on The wall is revenue and we keep sales and marketing aligned, then we’re going to be in a position and then that red.is revenue. And that’s why I want to challenge everybody the scorecard. At the end of the day, you may have all kinds of different scorecards.

But the real scorecard we’re aiming at whether you’re leading a sales team, or whether you’re working in the marketing team, the real scorecard is always revenue and the two types of revenue, which I’m sure we’ll talk about in a moment.

Mostafa Hosseini  13:53

True types. So for people that are kind of puzzled and not sure what is the difference between sales and marketing, and how are they separate?

Darrell Amy  14:07

Yeah, it’s it’s a great question. I think sales people are generally going to be in a one to one conversation. So the salesperson is responsible for understanding the network of decision makers inside an account and building those relationships, one to one and truly customizing the conversation around the outcomes that each one of those individual decision makers want and that specific company sales is also responsible for getting everybody that table to make a decision, which is a huge issue right now.

Getting consensus to move forward, especially for my friends in b2b. Were an average buying team according to Brent Adamson and that Dixon, the guys from the Challenger customer. You know, in some industries as buying teams have more than more than 10 P People engage decision makers and influencers. So sales gets down to the nitty gritty of those relationships and understanding both the business and relational dynamics of that.

Marketing is going to start from the other side, it’s going to be usually one to many. And you know, as, as we’re getting more engaged in Account Based Marketing, that one to many, the many is getting a little smaller, we’re getting a little more focused, which I’m a huge advocate for. But marketing is usually representing the company out to a client sales, it’s relational. You know, let’s, let’s just be realistic. Even in today’s world, people still buy from people they know, like and trust.

So that marketing is trying to build a level of credibility for the company, the salespeople are trying to build a level of credibility for themselves, so that they can get the approval and consensus to move forward. Great question. Yeah.

Mostafa Hosseini  15:58

I know, people use the words inter changeably. And sometimes I feel like they don’t quite understand the difference between sales and marketing. And I know a lot of people are confused about it. So you talked about two types of revenue. Yes. And not before I get to that. In a No BS Turman approach, and in a simple way, are we saying that we’re doing all of this sales and marketing to make money at the end of the day? Is that what you’re saying? It’s 100% 100%.

Darrell Amy  16:31

And, you know, sales and marketing teams are responsible for top line revenue going into a company period. And that’s where, you know, I think, I think there’s a tendency to, to get lost in some of the details of all the different things we have going on, especially in the marketing world. But to my friends in sales, as well, we get lost in the details and focusing maybe on one type of revenue instead of both, and which we’ll talk about here in a moment.

But that that is, you know, I think it’s critical to always remember, we’re watching, we got the Super Bowl coming up on Sunday, right? So, you know, Super Bowl is gonna have all kinds of statistics, there’s going to be yards per carry quarterback efficiency number, sack. So there’s like all kinds of data, I think, you know, Amazon, is now warehousing all that data, so they can give real time stats. But there’s only one piece of data that actually matters at the end of the day.

And that’s the score, who got more points, at the end of the day, and to my friends in Canada, you know, when the Grey Cup comes around this summer, it’s gonna be the same thing. You’ll have all kinds of data, but there’s only one thing that matters, marketing’s got all kinds of data sales has all kinds of leading indicators. With the end of the day, there’s only one piece of data there that matters. And that’s how much revenue do we drive and in so that’s why I’m at an adamant about this.

And I think, you know, just a little aside on on this, I know a lot of a lot of our friends in marketing, you come across a new strategy, something you believe passionately in, and and you struggle to get budget and buy in from the executive team in your organization.

And I would say if you’re struggling to get budget and buy in, I would I would challenge you to go okay, maybe maybe if you can tie this more directly to revenue, you’re gonna get a little more attention than just, you know, I’m really excited about this new strategy. Anyhow, that’s a little footnote on all of this. But we got to remember that revenue is key. And we’ve got to remember that, that we’re responsible for driving both types of revenue, not just one. Yeah.

Mostafa Hosseini  18:49

I think over the years, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, where I get myself busy doing things, acting and thinking like, I’m being productive, and at the end of the day, the cash is not matching my activities. And like you say, if it’s not producing money, then I don’t care about likes and exposures and views and whatnot, if it’s not helping me run a business and pay my bills and pay my team and grow that way.

Darrell Amy  19:24

Absolutely.

Mostafa Hosseini  19:27

Hmm. You talked about leading indicators, is revenue the only thing that you track or are there other things that helps us kind of lead up to revenue?

Darrell Amy  19:40

Well, I’ve been talking about these two types of revenue. And I think this is where this is the heart of the revenue growth engine. And this is the foundation for what I call exponential revenue growth. Because if you think about it, when you think about revenue, there’s there’s really only two kinds of revenue. There’s net new business we go out we get The new logo, we land a new deal, we get some market share. And then there’s cross sell revenue.

This is where we land and expand, we grow wallet share inside our current client base, cross sell upsell, all of that. And if you think about it, those are the two core sources of revenue you get, what will dere What if my company acquires another company is that a source of revenue, what kind of but you better keep driving net new and cross sell otherwise, the executive team that’s not going to be very happy. But here’s, here’s what I’ve noticed two observations.

One is, when you get both net new and cross sell going, at the same time, you get a hockey stick approach, if you can drive, it’s very interesting. On our website at revenue growth engine.com. And the toolkit, we have a really simple spreadsheet I call the exponential growth planner. And if you take net new, and your measure for net new business is how many customers do we have? Really simple? How many customers do we have?

And let’s say we grow that by 15%, year over year over year, you got 100, at the end of the year, you have 115, what’s our revenue per customer, that’s the measure of cross sell effectiveness. Because if you’re selling more to your clients, your revenue per customer is going to go up, if you could grow that revenue per customer, if you have the right systems and processes in place and grow that revenue per customer by 15%.

What’s incredible is if you get both of those going at the same time, you actually double business, you double revenue organically in less than three years. Now the challenge though the second observation, so that’s exciting, by the way, and the entrepreneurs and business owners that I talked to about exponential revenue growth, that gets them excited, because they go wow, modest growth in net new number of customers, and compounded with modest growth in revenue per customer, literally can put us in a position of doubling our business in less than three years, keep that cycle going. And in a decade, you’ve doubled, doubled and doubled.

I mean, the revenue is is really exciting, right all sudden that $10 million business is an $80 million business in a decade through organic growth. Problem is and here’s the challenge. And this is this is why I’m so passionate about the revenue growth engine for companies that want to grow is that typically, most companies I’ve been into or in talked with, they tend to be good at one or the other. They’re either good at going out and landing the new deals.

Or they’re really good at managing their current client relationships and growing that revenue per client. But it’s been a long time since they sold anyone new. And so what I would say is, first of all, you know, I’d ask everybody got check real honest answer, what are you better at right now are you better at net new are you better at cross sell. And then look at the area where you’re not good, keep doing what you’re doing in the area where you’re good, but in the area where you’re not good put some focus there in terms of processes systems that you can put in place to ensure that you know, if you’re good at net new put systems in place to ensure that you cross sell and the whole last half of revenue, growth engine, shares, ideas and systems you can put into place.

flipside, if you’re not good at at net new, you’re great at cross sell, put processes and systems in place for net new. And this you know this whole thing about modest gains in each one of those areas. 12 15% You’ll see that in the spreadsheet and our free toolkit at revenue growth engine.com When you see that you just go wow, okay, this is cool, because a it’s doable. And B it’s exciting when you start to see that hockey stick. Go up into the to the right. And for my Canadian friends. We all like to see a hockey stick, right? So yeah, so that’s exponential revenue growth.

Mostafa Hosseini  24:15

You know, what I love about what you just said is like you said, you’re gonna double your business in three years. You didn’t say we’re gonna 10x in a night in three days.

Darrell Amy  24:23

You know? Yeah, yeah. Anytime you see someone that says they’re gonna 10x Your Business formula

Mostafa Hosseini  24:28

and 10x your business and like, yeah, so I’m like, why don’t you just do yourself? Why are you selling this? Yeah,

Darrell Amy  24:35

when you’re scrolling through Facebook and you see that you should, you should unfollow. But exactly. Those people usually aren’t your friends. That’s usually sponsored content. But the Yeah, the whole thing is if you look and this is a sensible, I call it in the book. I call it aggressive but realistic goals. Because look when it comes to setting revenue goals, most come Companies do one or two things. They either do the spaghetti on the wall approach, they’re sitting there annual planning going, Oh, what do you think we can do this year?

And then go I don’t know. And the, you know, the the entrepreneur goes, Well, I think, you know, we can, we can 10 exit, and then the operation finance guy goes, Well, I think we can grow up by 3% or whatever. And then they come up with some number in the middle. But it’s, it’s has no basis in reality, you know that when you get to June or July, and you’re reviewing the numbers and you’re not hitting them and someone goes, Well, that wasn’t realistic in the first place.

How many times we’ve been there. The other way that companies set is, here’s my prop right here, I call it the ruler method. Right? So we’ll take a look at what we did this year, this year, this year, we’ll put a little ruler on it. And we’ll set our revenue goal. Well, that’s conservative. But let’s be honest, number one, the industries that we’re all selling into a changing rapidly is very dynamic marketplace. So I mean, is that even a great place to start. And the second thing is, you may be leaving lots of money on the table. So here’s how I recommend you set goals.

And, you know, for marketing friends that are listening in and this is a great one to bring to the executive team, take these two numbers, net new and cross sell, how many customers do we have? What’s our revenue per customer? And then set realistic goals and how much you could grow each one of those? Oh, man, I think we could grow net new by 20% right now. And I think if we you know, put the right systems and processes in place, we could grow our revenue per customer by 15%. Okay, then do the math and add that up.

Now that goal is going to seem aggressive, because when you start compounding things gets kind of exciting. But it’s going to be realistic, because it’s based on some actual numbers. And this gives businesses a business teams leadership teams a way to have a reasonable discussion about the business goal, and then also to be able to track it, how many customers do we add?

Hope we kept our current customers do and how many, you know, what’s our revenue per customer? And how are we doing? That’s going to show me the health of those two parts of the business.

Mostafa Hosseini  27:18

Love it. Love it, love it. So about like 10 20% a year compounding over 10 years. That’s like the law. You know, sometimes our if not all the time I say we’ve got to slow down to speed up. Yes. And I’ve seen people that yeah, they 10x over 90 days, but they can’t handle it. And they just crash right back down. And they they have a bunch of unhappy customers. And then, you know, it just doesn’t it barely ever works. Well, people doing it. But

Darrell Amy  27:51

yeah, well, here’s, here’s the deal. I mean, you can you can out kick your coverage to use another football analogy, right? You can, you can set yourself up. So you grow too fast. And and so every business has a limited amount of operational capability to deliver doesn’t matter what you sell, whether you’re a services company or product company, there’s only so much inventory, if you will, to sell. So who are you going to sell it to and who you’re going to target.

The next thing we talked about in the revenue growth engine book, and I’m very passionate about this is understanding your ideal client. An ideal client is someone that needs everything that you offer, and combine everything that you sell and aligns with your company’s values. They’re good, they’ve got a lot of potential yield or value, and they’re good fit. Why is that important?

Well, if you’ve got a limited amount of capability to deliver, wouldn’t you want to focus on the types of clients that have the opportunity to develop a long term relationship with you, and that are actually going to appreciate you how many times have we bend over backwards in our business to try to make a square peg fit in a round hole. And we’ve, you know, done all kinds of things. And then the customer just leaves at the next opportunity to go wait a second.

So I’m an advocate for understanding who your ideal clients are, we walk you through in the book, how to develop an ideal client profile. It’s not always your biggest clients. But it’s the best fit clients that align with your business and what we do in the book as well as we challenge you to, to discover the 10 year value of an ideal client, like sit down. And once you’ve you’ve we coach people to say Hey, pick four or five clients that you just really like working with that need everything that you sell, let’s start to describe those. And then let’s ask the question, what if what if these ideal clients bought everything they could buy from our company over the next 10 years?

And I know I know in marketing we’re supposed to do lifetime value of the client. My opinion of that is that’s too slippery. I want to know next decade, what could they buy if they were all in Plus, once we know what they could buy over the next decade, I just moved the decimal one place over now I know their annual value, which is easy math, which is good for recovering sales, guys. So I look at the 10 year value of an ideal client.

And what I’ve discovered in I’ve been in large businesses, small businesses across multiple industries, all over North America. And on average, an ideal client is worth 20 to 30x, your average client, Darrell, how much is our average client worth easy math, totally annual revenue divided by your number of clients, that’s your average client value right now. It’s your measure cross sell effectiveness. So if we can understand who these ideal clients are, then what we do is we focus our sales and marketing efforts on these ideal clients, we focus our message around the outcomes these ideal clients want.

And we ensure that you know, for the sales team, hey, you can call on whoever you want, we’ll take an order from anyone, but 100%, guaranteed, you’re going to call on these ideal targets, ideal prospects. That’s how it works around here, why don’t want to call on that ideal prospect, no problem, we’ll assign it to somebody else. But 100% of the time, they’re gonna hear from us.

Same thing in marketing, we’ll talk about marketing 100% engagement targets here in just a second. This one’s a little controversial, but hey, we’re having fun. But that’s where we go, okay, let’s, if we’re going to drive exponential revenue, we need the type of clients that can buy everything that we sell. And that’s where an ideal client is that type of person.

So I don’t, you know, I’ll take steady growth with ideal clients over 100x selling to the world, when I can’t even deliver, no one’s going to be happy, and three quarters, and we’re gonna leave anyways, I’ll take ideal clients all day long, because they’re the ones that when you see their caller ID on the phone, you don’t have that hesitation and go, I have to take this call you go, I look forward to talking to him, because you’re good fit. Really, really, really powerful on so we spend the rest of the show talking about ideal clients, I’m passionate about this.

And I think when you start to add up the tenure value that’s in our toolkit, as well as a spreadsheet to add up the tenure value of an ideal client, on our website. And it’s like, every time I do that with an executive team, we’ll have the owner, the, you know, the CEO, sales leaders, marketing leaders in there, and we add all that stuff up. Without fail.

There’s jaws on the table going, Whoa, I had one recently we did, where their ideal client was literally 100x, their average client, there’s your there’s what you want to see the 10x and 100x. All right, don’t go after 10x growth go after 10x clients clients. Oh, yeah, that’s like, trademark that. That’s good. Right there, right? Don’t go after 10x growth go after 10x clients, because when you bring those clients on, they’re gonna give you the growth if you have the right systems in

Mostafa Hosseini  33:10

place. And I’m a huge fan of the 8020 principle. And those are probably the top 20% of your customers that give you like 80 or 90% of your sales. And like you bring in one extra customer, and that would like double, triple 5x or 10x, your sales. And it’s much different, same type of effort. But yeah,

Darrell Amy  33:34

if you take a look, this is another great exercise, get your list of current clients and the revenue they did with you over the last year or five years or whatever time frame you want. If you got 100 carve off the top 20% and add that revenue up it parado Vilfredo Pareto that Italian economist, he’s never wrong. And if he’s wrong, it’s because it’s like 95, five, not at 10.

And this is where we got to understand who our ideal clients are. And if we do who our ideal clients are, you know who our ideal prospects are, then we don’t need leads anymore, because we already know who our leads are. What we need is engagement with those ideal prospects. Absolutely.

Mostafa Hosseini  34:20

You talked about a new Pakistan to revenue growth engine. Tell us more about it. Well,

Darrell Amy  34:25

if you think about the concept of an engine, every every business has a revenue growth engine is the sum total of your sales and marketing processes that drive growth and whether you’re a startup working in a coffee shop, or whether you’re a global 100 company, with offices on every continent, you’ve got a revenue growth engine in your business.

The problem is where that gets the question is how many cylinders does your engine have? I got the idea for the book. Actually the whole concept of revenue growth engine one day as I was mowing my lawn, you go Darrell, aren’t successful people supposed to hire someone to mow their lawn? Like, haven’t you been to any kind of seminar and I’m like, I know, I know. But what I like about mowing my lawn is I can sit on my 60 inch zero turn lawnmower, and for 35 minutes, nobody can call me. I can listen to great podcasts like this and get great ideas.

So I’m puttering across my lawn. And then when you’re done course, when you work in marketing, you don’t always see the results right away. But my lawn looks good when I’m done with it. So anyhow, I’m puttering across my lawn. And I see my car on at the end of the driveway, and I realize my lawn mower has an engine, and my car has an engine. But they’re very, very different. Now I looked it up my 60. And zero turn lawnmower has a 24.5 horsepower engine, great for a lawnmower, not good if I want to get on the freeway, right?

My car, 330 horsepower, turbo charge, I don’t know what the zero to 60 or 02 100 kilometers an hour for my Canadian friends is. But it’ll get you there fast. And so what I realized is every business has a growth engine. The question is, how many cylinders? Does your growth engine have? How much horsepower is in their art? Is it firing on all cylinders? And in the case of most businesses are their cylinders missing. And that’s what I wanted to be able to do with the revenue growth engine was to put a model in place economist lay down on top of your current business and see that’s missing, or we should improve over here.

 Because when you get the engine firing on all cylinders, that’s when you can accelerate. And I don’t know about you, but I like accelerating. So I want you know, I want the business to accelerate. Just like I want my car to accelerate and and the more powerful your engine, the faster you’re going to be able to grow.

Mostafa Hosseini  36:51

For sure. At the term firing on all cylinders is something I’ve been thinking about actually for the past week or two. But I’m thinking, what if my business was firing on all cylinders? What if this thing was firing on all cylinders? And it just makes a difference? If and if one or two of your cylinders are not firing? Or they’re half firing? You’d be in trouble.

Darrell Amy  37:14

Yeah, you would, I was actually putting some videos together last week for a new website. And I was thinking about back in the day I used to, I used to have a six cylinder SUV was Toyota four runner. And on a ski boat. I love boats. I think he said that in the introduction. And so I live right on the south edge of the Ozark Mountains.

And there’s lots of great beautiful lakes here. So anyhow, my boat, I could pull to the lake, put in a lake Have a great day and all that, then I got another boat and this other, this next boat was a little bit bigger, because that’s how it works, right? So little bit heavier. And I’m pulling that boat to the lake with my six cylinder truck and I get about halfway up one of these big hills, and I just have that sinking feeling going, Oh, I might not make it to the top of this hill, I need a bigger engine.

And so I quickly discovered that if I was going to keep that new boat, I was gonna have to get a new truck with an eight cylinder engine and which I did and and I think this is kind of the evolution of a business as your business grows and hits different plateaus on your way up. You know, every time you hit one of those plateaus, I think it’s a it’s a sign that you need to reevaluate reevaluate your engine.

You know, the six cylinder engine may have been great to get you to where you are right now. But maybe it’s time for eight cylinder diesel or maybe it’s time you know, for tractor trailer or some you know something bigger, because the reality is, at at every point along the way in the evolution of your business, this is where this is where you need more and more horsepower in your engine.

Mostafa Hosseini  38:54

Absolutely, absolutely. So what are some signs that you see in your sales and marketing that you that you should be aware? And those are signs of your cylinders not firing?

Darrell Amy  39:09

Well, I think that best place to start is at the dashboard. And on the dashboard. There should there’s two dials on most cars, you get the RPMs and the miles per hour or kilometers per hour. The two two dials on your revenue growth engine are what we talked about earlier. net new business and cross sell business. So are we growing net new? And are we growing revenue per client cross sell business? I think that’s where you start because the reality is there are a lot of businesses that are growing. But when you pull you know kind of look at the dashboard from that perspective, they’re really healthy in one area and maybe not so healthy in the other so that’s where to me where you get the clue you know the the indicators that you go okay I think we need to look at our cross sell revenue.

Now, you know, now you can start to look and go, Okay, well, let’s look at that from a sales perspective. And let’s look at that from a marketing perspective. from a sales perspective throughout that client lifecycle, you’ve got onboarding, right, Gru salespeople turning in an order, and then bye, bye, see later? Or are they engaged, realizing they don’t close a sale, they open a relationship. And they’re engaged throughout the onboarding process in such a way that sets up regular periodic quarterly business reviews in a way that sets up a renewal process possibly.

And, and so that they’re developing that relationship with the client continuing to add value, and are growing inside that account base. And getting referrals along the way. The marketing side too, if you’re if your revenue per client isn’t looking that great, you start to go, Okay, well, marketing, you go, Whoa, where’s your marketing time and effort being spent? Is it with generating net new leads? Or is it with engaging with current clients to drive cross sell revenue?

You know, we live in a market, especially in the digital marketing world, where we’re always, you know, kind of bumping up against the wall of Do I have permission and all that? Well, if you have a current customer, you have permission, they bought something from you. Yeah, marketing does not end when somebody becomes a customer, the marketing only just begun. And that’s where I think a lot of organizations miss it as well. So do we have a client loyalty program? Do we have a client communication program? Do we have ways to continue to educate, equip, nurture, events, all all kinds of different strategies you can put in place?

And that’s where, you know, I think when you when you figure out if it’s net new or cross sell, then you go, Okay, what’s sales doing? What’s marketing doing? By the way? Is any of it documented? Or is it just all fly by the seat of your pants, because if it’s not documented, you know, Gino Wickman, in the book, traction says, if you haven’t documented something, you can improve it until you document it. Now, once it’s documented, it may not be a perfect process.

But once it’s documented, you can improve it. And that’s where, you know, if you if you start lifting the hood, and looking at that engine, and realize nothing’s written down, everyone’s revenue growth engine should have an owner’s manual. And in the build your revenue growth engine mentorship program, that’s what everyone does actually build an owner’s manual throughout that program for their revenue growth engine so that they can hand it to a new person on the sales and marketing team that can hand it to their marketing partners that they work with.

And to go, this is what we do around here. This is how we do it. Now if you want to make recommendations to improve it. Awesome. But for most companies, they don’t even have it documented. So imagine, imagine buying a car that didn’t have an owner’s manual repair guide. Imagine buying a car that someone just put together in a factory and said, Here you go, and when it stops performing? Yeah, huh. That’s a bummer. Hey, there’s what do you do? Well, that’s not how it works. We if you have an engine and the you know, it throws a certain code or a certain light comes on, you know what to do about it.

I think if you have not documented your net new and cross sell processes for sales and marketing, then you need to do it. And and I think that’s where you start. Because even in that, in documenting those, you’re gonna be able to go, oh, wow, we could fix that. Or you go, wow, the emperor has no clothes here. They were just you know, winging it. And so that’s where this whole concept of an engine is a flywheel right, in. Good to Great Jim Collins talks about the flywheel of business. Yes, sales and marketing are not one time events, what we need to be looking for is where can we create those flywheels

Mostafa Hosseini  44:09

for sure. I’m a huge fan of good to great. And I’m a huge fan of his graph. I don’t know if we’re talking about the same thing, but I’m looking at the book right now. And it’s funny, he says, where you want to be is a common denominator between your, your sales driver and what you love to do, and I can be wrong. And I’m just just going by my memory, and what the customer is asking for that middle part is where you want to be. Are you talking about same graph? I might. Or, I’m

Darrell Amy  44:46

just thinking just about the whole flywheel concept that you know, just going along that thread of conversation. This is another reason why it’s important to have an ideal client and really understand the ideal client because here’s the deal. Well, there’s a lot of noise out there. I think we all know this 3030 500 message messages a day that we’re all exposed to from billboards, banner ads, YouTube advertisements, why can’t I watch a YouTube video without to commercials, you know, we have all these.

So we of course, we filter stuff out, right? We have massive filters, otherwise we go insane. And the only thing I think that gets through those filters are ideas related to the outcomes that we want to achieve. And so the problem with a lot of marketing right now, in my humble opinion, is when you try to market to the masses, you end up being so generic, I call it marketing mush, right? You end up saying things like our business, when you work with us, we can help you be more productive, more efficient, we can help you drive cost efficiencies and improve security, meaningless.

It doesn’t mean it sounds great, right? It’s great business jargon, it means absolutely nothing. It’s like static noise, right? The old days, and you have the lore on the car, right? And it just gets tuned out. When you understand who your ideal client is, you can create a focused message so you can talk to your current ideal clients, in this current environment, February 120 23, what’s going on?

And, you know, I watched this happen during the pandemic, it went at first, you know, big massive shift in the world. Companies were, you know, in 2019, selling for the most part, the exact same products that they were selling in 2020. But buyers, in a lot of cases, were buying something totally different because buyers don’t buy products and services. They buy the outcomes as products and services, enabling Gartner, the Tech Research Company, I’ve done most of my career in tech. Gartner said in 2019, everyone’s looking for scalability, rapid growth, you know, all of that.

All sudden, in 2020, same products. What are they looking for redundancy, resiliency, remote work, you know, all of that type of stuff, the outcome shifted. And what I think is really, really important. And this is why in marketing in particular, we got our ear to the ground, and I said to the ground and gotta be listening to our current clients, what’s going on in your business right now. And that message has got to be spot on.

Otherwise, we’re just gonna get caught in the static noise. And you know, our response rates are going to be abysmally low, we’re going to be frustrated. But when we can do it, I use the analogy. Now, this is going to prove I’m Canadian. In the book, The analogy I use is maple syrup. I love maple syrup. In fact, I’ve got a great friend that hooks me up with pure Canadian maple syrup. That’s how Yeah, this is my love language. And you know, the story of maple syrup.

Of course, it starts with 40 gallons of sap, it gets boiled down to one gallon of the most delicious substance on Earth. Now that maple syrup is like your message, you got to start and boil it down to the things that really really matter to those ideal clients. Once you know your ideal client, you can build a message. So that’s where I think it’s so critical right now, there’s so much noise on all these different platforms. The only thing in my opinion that’s going to break through that noise is a focus message based on the outcomes your ideal clients want to achieve.

Mostafa Hosseini  48:37

Absolutely. Absolutely. So tell us about your gift, please. Darrell, the

Darrell Amy  48:46

wrote a book, I wrote all this down, which was a labor of love is a lot of fun actually writing this book. And not only did I write it, I also record a Reddit I recorded it, which was definitely a labor of love. Can you imagine reading a book out loud from beginning to end, but a great coach that helped me produce the audio book.

And so right now, I thought the best thing to do is would be to give folks access to the audio book, you can access it right away if what we’re talking about today is striking a chord, you can go to revenue growth engine.com/book Or if you’re out driving around, pull over and text the word revenue to 21,000. That’s revenue to 21,000. And you can get immediate access to the revenue growth engine audio book and I’ll walk you through the concepts we’ve talked about today.

Exponential revenue growth, ideal clients your focus message plan and all the different cylinders of your revenue growth engine and when you get the book I hope you connect with me I’d love to to get to know you and what’s going on in your business. We were always sharing things on our on my LinkedIn page. file, I share a lot of concepts. I’m always looking for new ideas.

So I love mixing it up out there. But yeah, I encourage everyone grab a copy of the books, my gift to you. And you’ll be able to take some of the concepts we’ve talked about today and start to put them to work to grow your business.

Mostafa Hosseini  50:16

Fantastic. So gank to get access to Darryl, his gift, revenue growth engine audio book, have you narrated it yourself? Or did you?

Darrell Amy  50:25

Did I did I narrated it from beginning to end? Yeah. So

Mostafa Hosseini  50:30

it’s narrated by the man, the legend himself, go to revenue growth engine.com forward slash book to get this audio book. So, Darryl, you talk about we said, we don’t people don’t need leads, companies don’t lead need leads? That’s a big claim. What do you mean by that? Yeah,

Darrell Amy  50:51

this one always grabs some attention. So here’s the deal. So I’ve lived in this world between sales and marketing, right? So sales, like you’re not giving us enough leads. So the marketing, we generate a bunch of leads, and then what does salespeople go, these leads are garbage, you know, and it goes back and forth.

And I’ve just, I just want to say, stop it, just stop it. If you know who your ideal client is, then you should be able to know who your ideal prospects are. And especially in the world of b2b, where you can narrow that down to a specific list of companies that you want to work with. I don’t need leads, I already know who my leads are. I need engagement with the decision makers and influencers in those accounts.

So what I say is, looks, let’s stop, it’s great. Interestingly, most of the things that you do for Account Based Marketing are going to drive inbound marketing. But let’s stop waiting for fish to swim by and nibbling on something. And let’s take this list of ideal prospects and let’s go get them. Right from a sales perspective, we have a target account program, backed up with prospecting sequences and a whole cadence and documented process. From a marketing perspective, this one’s a little bit different. But I want to challenge everyone to think about this.

Let’s say you had 1000. So in sales side, finish the sales side, what I’m going to aim for is 100% coverage. Every one of these ideal prospects hears from our sales team on a regular pre agreed upon cadence, once a quarter, whatever that is. What if we flip that to marketing and said, Okay, let’s, of course, we’ll fish swim by grab something off the website, that’s great. Well nurture them, flip them into leads.

But these 1000 companies that our ideal prospects, let’s set a goal of 100% engagement with them. So that we have some type of engagement with them that we’ve at least pinged on their radar, once a quarter, let’s say or whatever thing now, are we ever going to get to 100%? Of course not. But in the world where we’re measuring, like email, open rates in the single digits, and, you know, back when you could hope to measure click through rates, and different things like that, this flips the whole thing on its head, because what we’re aiming for, is we’re aiming to say, look, once again, we’ll take a lead from anybody but these ideal prospects, the list these 100,000 companies, 5000, companies, whatever that is, they will, your our goal in marketing is, even if you know, we can send emails, we can send texts, we can do banner ads, and paid ads and retargeting.

We can do all kinds of stuff. But even if we have to send them a FedEx package, you know, to get their attention, we’re gonna get on their radar. And to me what that 100% engagement thing does, is it opens the minds of all of us in marketing to go, okay, how can I pull this off? Because these are the companies that need to know the name of our business, you know, and, and in the world, you don’t have a marketing budget, unless you’re Nike or Coca Cola.

You can’t boil the ocean, you’ve got to be focused. So how can we focus on getting on the radar of the decision makers and influencers in these 1000 companies, and I think the whole Account Based Marketing movement is heading in the right direction on that. And to me that the biggest thing there is just that philosophy of saying, Hey, this is who we’re going after, let’s go get them rather than well, we just didn’t get a lot of web traffic.

Okay, well, you know, that those days, those days are gone. And that’s where we have a lot of companies I talked to the top of the hour about companies that had tried inbound marketing. And I’d sold it to him I was really good at selling inbound marketing. And so I’d sold it to him saying, Hey, we’re gonna, you know, we’re gonna answer people’s questions.

We’re gonna get found online. We’re gonna get search engine placement when someone’s looking, but I have this nagging realization in the back of my mind that for everyone that’s looking actively for the solution that your company offers. There’s probably 20 people that need what you offer that are out there looking for it yet. And so we need to go engage with those people.

Mostafa Hosseini  55:13

Absolutely. So there’s a question in chat about about this engagement piece. And yes, communication has to start somewhere, providing a way to connect with an awesome way, is an awesome way to do that, from the marketing point of where you can you talk about why you choose to go the book route? And also, once you have someone in your social circle, how do you keep them engaged?

Darrell Amy  55:38

It’s a great question. Well, so I think a book, this is my perspective, and there’s always multiple perspectives on this, a book is high value. And to me, it’s it’s low cost, right, the books been produced, an audio book doesn’t have a cost of distribution for me. And also, and by the way, I’ve for a long time, we’ve done just pay shipping and handling on the book, and I’ll send you one. And by the way, if you want to do that, I’m happy to send you a book a print book.

But there’s a delay. So by the time the order comes in, I send you the book, you get it a week later, you’ve long forgotten about that Canadian guy that lives in the South that talked about some kind of revenue, motor or something. So with, I like the audio book, it’s instant gratification, it is immediate, and I’m playing with something new. So my marketing friends out there will know I’m actually hosting the book inside a private podcast that you’ll get access to. And inside that private podcast, I’ve got it hosted on a platform that does dynamic ad insertion. So as you’re listening to the book, at the end of each chapter, I can have calls to action.

So just literally just set that up last week. So I didn’t even have all the calls to action and all the chapters yet. So I’m curious what y’all think about that when you hear the book. But the idea is, now we’ll be able to drop that inside someone’s podcast player, they can listen to the book, there’s calls to action, I can change those. And if I want to drop a bonus item in there, in the future, it’s going to pop up in your podcast feed. That’s what I’m trying.

So that’s where and once once they’re in, you’ll notice you’ll go into a funnel we have a masterclass we have the build your revenue, growth engine mentorship program, where we work with a company and walk with them for an entire year, through the process of building the core part of their engine, their net new their cross sell in the fourth quarter, all the cadences they need to put in place to keep it upgraded. Fantastic.

Mostafa Hosseini  57:41

Yeah. Fantastic. Darrell, give us a 32nd or less simple marketing strategy that people can use right now and seeing some results results rather immediately.

Darrell Amy  57:57

I like client education. And I can do this in 30 seconds, you can get a learning management system. They’re a dime a dozen. They’re everywhere. You can take courses and teach your clients how to use your products and services in those courses that you create. And in the process, set yourself up for cross sell, and deliver a better customer experience.

So I don’t think a lot of companies are doing this yet. I really love the idea of getting a learning management system and building a client education system. You’ve got immediate opportunity to go out and start cross selling, but you’re doing it through education, which I’m a Jay Abraham fan paradox knowledge, the more you know about something, the more questions you have, we’re gonna go get an answer. So I say for a lot of companies set up a client education portal to start marketing your clients by teaching them about love it.

Mostafa Hosseini  58:49

Let me ask you a few personal questions if that’s okay. Sure. Bring it on. And these are like we need like simple questions, simple responses. What’s a new thing you have tried recently, big or small?

Darrell Amy  59:04

trekking, I got to track to Mount Everest base camp last year, that was a big leap for me

Mostafa Hosseini  59:09

on Everest. Unfortunately, we’re running out of time, but that I would have loved to just about that. Maybe next round. We’ll talk about mountain Everest. That’s

Darrell Amy  59:18

right. When you get the free book, you’re going to learn about an all new program. I’m rolling out tomorrow, which is the revenue growth expedition taking 12 entrepreneurs to Everest base camp. So part of our first take

Mostafa Hosseini  59:30

in 12 entrepreneurs to Everest base camp. When is this happening? Darrell?

Darrell Amy  59:35

It’s gonna happen November 1 through 15th. It’s gonna be 12 participants in your build your revenue growth engine program. So yeah, I’d love to come back and talk about that. Yeah, because it was a lot of fun, and also created a massive buzz for my company. So I want to be able to get that for a dozen other entrepreneurs.

Mostafa Hosseini  59:51

Yes. Great idea there. Give me two of your favorite books.

Darrell Amy  59:55

I like the experience economy by Joseph pine and James Gilmore. And also for your sales team, I want to introduce you to selling from the heart by Larry Levine. And I can’t give you the sneak preview of the book he’s releasing later this year, but just get selling from the heart. And you’re gonna see another book coming out right behind it that is dynamite.

Mostafa Hosseini  1:00:16

What’s one advice that made a big impact in your on your business or life?

Darrell Amy  1:00:22

Hmm. Get clear on your values and your mission. I think when you do that, it really helps you understand how you focus your effort. And this goes for entrepreneurs, but also goes for my friends in marketing as well. You’re gonna get up in the morning, and work all day you want to be promoting something you actively and passionately believe in. So I think get clear on that.

Mostafa Hosseini  1:00:46

Loving. And, Darrell, if you had a Facebook or Google mess ad, where everyone around the globe with access to internet Kitts see? What would your message be for people of Earth? People

Darrell Amy  1:01:00

of Earth chill out. It’s gonna be all right. About that. It’s

Mostafa Hosseini  1:01:06

gonna be alright. Love it. Don’t take it too hard on yourself. That’s

Darrell Amy  1:01:11

right. This

Mostafa Hosseini  1:01:14

is in conversation. Thank you very much for sharing all the knowledge and the wisdom. Is there anything that you maybe would have wanted to talk about that we didn’t get a chance to other than the to our story about Mount Everest? Well,

Darrell Amy  1:01:25

we could talk about my Everest suite about hockey, we could talk about all kinds of great things. But it’s been so much fun being here. And we can keep the conversation going on LinkedIn. So when you get a copy of the book, you’ll also get Oh, you’ll see text messages coming back to give you a link to the book.

So you also see some SMS marketing in action. One of those SMS is gonna have my LinkedIn profile. So please connect with me. We’ll keep the conversation going.

Mostafa Hosseini  1:01:48

Absolutely. So again, don’t forget to download his book. To get that you could go to revenue growth engine.com forward slash book, and get the audiobook from Darryl, and thank you for joining us. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to the show. If you have any questions or comments, put them in a in a comment below on whichever channel you’re watching.

And to get back to us then feel free to send the link of the show to a friend that could benefit from this conversation. And or send the link to DEROS book to a friend that could benefit from, you know, revenue growth and the rest of it. And we’ll go from there. Thank you for joining guys. Have yourself a great weekend. We’ll see you next week. Find out