IT Consulting Tips for Scaling Revenue Growth
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Creating scalable, predictable revenue growth
Okay. The next section moving on our agenda is creating scalable, predictable revenue growth. And as we can see from our next slide, here is a quote from W. Edwards Deming, who said, “In God we trust; all others must bring data. ”
Yeah. That’s pretty powerful stuff here.
We break revenue acceleration, sales cycle acceleration, down into four distinct phases. Attracting, converting, closing, and delighting; attracting the right strangers to your website, turning them into visitors, converting those visitors into leads, how to close those leads into clients, and how to deliver clients into promoters and evangelists.
So they fuel the cycle and bring you more strangers. You must be showing up in all boxes on this. Often, I use the baseball analogy for those of you that might be fans of baseball. And suppose you think about the players that typically go out on a baseball field. In that case, you have your outfield, you have your infield, you have your pitcher, and you have your catcher. For example, the Yankees showed up in Boston at Fenway, and the Red Sox had all 25 of their players ready to go.
But for some reason, only two players from the Yankees showed up. What would happen to the Yankees’ chances of winning? They’d be completely decimated. It doesn’t matter. They could have their best starting pitcher. They could have their best catcher, their best position player. But if they only have two players and the other team covers all nine positions on the field and has another 16 ready to go in reserves between the dugout and the bullpen. It would be tough to compete.
Along the same lines, if you’re not covering all of this, you’re just doing a little bit in the attract phase of worrying about getting visitors to your site, and you don’t have good conversion paths that are optimized for your ideal clients. If you don’t have conversion paths optimized to get people to reengage when they’re further along in the sales cycle, it’s going to be a problem.
If you haven’t thought about what it’s going to take to convert and close more of those leads into clients, it’s going to be a big problem. If you haven’t thought through a strategy for delighting your clients, because in a recurring revenue-based business like most colo data centers are, let’s face it. It’s not about getting them signed up. It’s about making sure that they’re happy. So they stay. And so they eventually may be able to upsell. You may cross-sell, and eventually, a small percentage of them will become your promoters and evangelists.
The flip side is if you altogether drop the ball, they become negative evangelists, negative promoters, in the age of Yelp, Amazon, and Google reviews, that’s a dangerous proposition too
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So if you want to create scalable, predictable revenue growth, keep all four of these boxes in mind.
Remember, people buy from people that they trust. I can’t overemphasize that enough, the moment of truth for kind of self-evaluating all of this is to look at your website, to start with your homepage, and look at:
Does your website content talk more about your company, your services, your stuff, your locations, your compliance? Or do you talk about the problems that you solve for your clients? Are you looking at it from the perspective of the two or three or four different kinds of ideal buyers you want to target and attract to your website?
Think about during that first. 57%, 60, 70%, 90%, the early stages of that buyer’s journey, which is a significant percentage of the buyer’s journey today, during this first 70% or more of the buyer’s journey, even your best prospects, won’t give a, what about your services until you have established trusted advisor status with them.
That is such an important mindset shift. That’s so critical. And we see so many colo data centers completely dropping the ball on this, where nearly all of the content on their homepage, almost all the stuff they’re sharing on social media, is salesy, self-promotional stuff.
It’s not providing helpful educational content. It’s not providing valuable resources in the eyes of the small sliver of the market that you want to stand out as the best teachers in the world, as the best communicators in the world, about what it is that you do.