Plenty of marketing professionals will tell you that their team is often misaligned, misunderstood, or competing against the sales team at their organization. Unsurprisingly, many sales professionals echo this same sentiment. In fact, a 2019 survey commissioned by LeanData and Sales Hacker uncovered that more than a third of those surveyed (37%) do not believe that sales and marketing are properly aligned.
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Formulating a social media plan has many rushing to hyped up platforms to shout, pose, rant and act if they are celebrities and that others care. Or you have heard and hopefully not said: “We should use social media because our competition does.” This is difficult to accept as a foundation for a strategy and plan.
It’s better to walk alone than with a crowd going in the wrong direction.”
- Gandhi
Today I want to share some thoughts about the real power of social media and how it potentially relates to your company, team and revenue growth.
I suspect it will be much different from the noise marketers share. Please note that my focus is to support profitable B2B revenue growth and may not align well with your business.
The second foundational question (FQ) in the Revenue Development Action Plan is:
What is your company’s purpose? Why are you here?”
In the early stages of creating a business there is a strong focus on developing a vision, a formal mission statement and company values. However, the company purpose is something that is often more elusive.
Most new businesses are primarily focused on generating enough revenue to be sustainable. Business owners may have a strong personal sense of why they formed the business, but that purpose is not always reflected throughout the company. As businesses grow, however, they may naturally begin to develop a purpose that drives strategic decision-making. This direction must be refined into a clear purpose statement or the company will aimlessly wander.
Strategy ideas are in abundant supply. Any and all may appear attractive and anyone with an active imagination can easily see the possibilities, but “possible” should not be confused with “probable”. Entrepreneurs (and intrapreneurs) with “irrational optimism” are eager to take action on the possibilities and leap without a parachute --- to fly or land with a splat.
Strategy is not a top priority for startups, entrepreneurs, and freelancers. The leaders are hunters in unfamiliar territory. To consider a strategy in the early stages seems a bit like making a plan to survive on Jupiter. Relying on theory, science and data works until it becomes apparent that it doesn’t.
Think of a strategy is a directed plan to which you commit your time and action in a single direction. A strategy aligns how you spend your time, money, resources, and your communication. This increases your chance for success.
When it comes to corporate communications, the writing is on the wall. Companies and their top managers need to develop a top-down approach to their online business, including social media, or find themselves left in the dust. The data supports this suggestion.
A hundred goals (maybe more) exist in the heads of those who are going bigger, conquering the world or changing the community. It can be difficult to line up the goals swirling in their heads. These goals are in the same mind soup, side by side with ‘old truth’ vs ‘new truth’, rumors, advice from future experts, news, big data, and ideas from a bestselling book. (With potential distractions from ‘competitors’.)
As a result, the goals are not always aligned, and it is tempting to get ‘speed think’, make a decision now to get things done.
Today we want to remind you that ‘It is still a pig”, and a few other observations to keep it real for you about branding, social media and humans.
Aka: Revenue Strategies - the Foundation for CRO Success
In a recent confidential interview, a CEO shared his thoughts about the next 12 months: "We believe we will achieve our revenue and profit goals over the next 12 months with our current resources. We have the right team, the latest software and tools, effective processes, remarkable products & services, strong branding and a unique value proposition." He went on to admit “… but we are not achieving our revenue and profit goals and we are still unsure why.”
The proper revenue strategy aligns marketing, sales, and customer experience teams around a singular goal: drive profitability. Without a strategic roadmap, healthy and sustained growth simply cannot flourish, which is why organizations put so much emphasis on the planning process. In fact, studies reveal that tightly-aligned sales and marketing functions result in an average of 36% higher customer retention rates and 38% higher sales closing rates, than their more loosely aligned counterparts.
Unraveling such a puzzle to understand what is ‘broken’ has us first visiting the revenue strategy. Choosing a revenue strategy impacts all other aspects of planning and whether goals are achieved.
