The CEO’s Gift Guide For Revenue Generation

We gave gifts to the digital marketer and the sales professional in your family and at your company, but why not take care of your CEO too?

CEOs need just as much attention and support as the marketing and sales pros in your organization.

Today, the complexity of revenue generation and business growth make this a challenge for even the most seasoned CEOs.

But not to worry – there are ways to make revenue generation repeatable, scalable and predictable in 2023. Here are some of the gifts we’re giving to our CEO clients.

Gift #1 – A Revenue Generation System

Most CEOs take a systems approach to hiring, finance, purchasing and delivery, but for some reason, revenue is left to more ad hoc activities.

A Revenue Generation System (RGS) is the process, methodology and tools necessary to build repeatable, predictable and scalable revenue growth for your company.

Typically, these actions, steps and processes are executed in marketing, sales and customer service. A Revenue Generation System ensures that all of these three typically disparate teams are working together inside the system to orchestrate the activities needed to help the company grow revenue.

A Revenue Generation System includes ALL the necessary steps required to make sure that the company isn’t missing anything necessary for revenue generation and business growth. It must cover four areas – strategy, tactics, campaigns and technology.

This is something every CEO is going to want in 2023, and more people are going to be looking at a system for revenue to finally crack the code around repeatable revenue generation.

Gift #2 – A Revenue Growth Technology Platform

One of the reasons companies struggle with revenue is that they need to do so much today to make it work and they rarely have the hands or expertise to do it all.

Technology is the answer here, so our gift is a single platform that automates, analyzes, operationalizes and supports all three revenue areas – marketing, sales and customer service.

With a technology platform, you can do more with your existing team. You can automate repeatable processes like posting blog articles on social platforms. You can analyze all aspects of your performance to make educated decisions based on data instead of gut feelings.

Even more importantly, you don’t have to keep adding sales reps when you want to grow revenue. Instead, you can do more revenue with the same number or even fewer sales reps, putting your sales process into your CRM, automating follow-up, scoring leads to help reps prioritize their efforts and arming them with emails to make each prospect’s experience the same regardless of rep.

All this is going to make your revenue cycle spin faster, which means more leads, more sales opportunities, a shorter sales cycle and a higher close rate. This is going to make a lot of CEOs extremely happy in 2023.

Gift #3 – An Upgraded Big Story

Someone has to take accountability for ensuring the company has something interesting to say and a unique position in your industry. That falls directly on the CEO. Take a look at the story for your business. Is it even remotely interesting?

When you go to a party and someone asks what you do and you say, “We sell safety products,” that’s an epic failure. Who cares?

But if your answer is, “We help people go home safe every single night,” that is something that will always get attention, engage people and stand out.

You need a similar big story for your company.

Most B2B companies think the big story is just for B2C companies like Nike, North Face or FedEx. But the reality is EVERY company needs an emotional, compelling and engaging big story.

This big story is used by every salesperson, included in everything marketing does and used to tie together your entire value proposition.

Without it, it’s like going to play professional football with only six players when your competition has 11 players.

In 2023, get the big story your company deserves.

Gift #4 – Differentiation That Makes Your Company Remarkable

You’ve probably heard that if you don’t have anything nice to say, you shouldn’t say anything at all. The same applies to business. If you don’t have anything remarkable to say about your business, you shouldn’t say anything at all.

Take a look at your company’s website and then take a look at your competitors’ websites. Do you see any dramatic differences? If not, you need the gift of differentiation.

Your company has to be remarkable to stand out in a very crowded market. Every company needs to be differentiated and have remarkable aspects of its operation.

And what’s most interesting is, when we work with companies, these remarkable elements exist but are almost never used in their marketing and sales efforts.

If you’re looking to understand this better, consider reading Seth Godin’s “Purple Cow.” Then get to work giving your company a gift that will help you ensure a long-term, sustainable set of differentiators.

Gift #5 – A Set Of KPIs That Are Actionable

This gift is more for the marketing part of your business than the sales part. Historically, sales is much easier to measure. Revenue generated, new customers, close rate and percent of revenue vs. goal are metrics that almost every company can track to measure sales.

Other key performance metrics (KPIs) will provide insight into how sales is doing, like pipeline velocity, sales cycle in days, pipeline value and conversion rates through the sales cycle. You could relatively easily put a sales dashboard together that will inform CEOs about company sales performance.

But the major challenge is usually marketing-related metrics. For years marketers have skated by the measurement issues by claiming marketing is an art, not a science. That has changed for good.

CEOs should be using KPIs that provide insight into how marketing is contributing to revenue. Visitors to your website, conversions on the website, MQLs generated by the website, SQLs and sales opportunities generated by the website all indicate that your inbound marketing is working.

If you’re running more demand generation than metrics associated with your ad campaigns like impressions, clicks and conversions, you should also look at the ungated content you’re offering and measure the views and downloads associated with those assets.

Today almost everything is measurable across all aspects of marketing, and if you want insight into what’s working and what’s not, this is how you do it.

Gift #6 – Return On Your Investment In Marketing

CEOs, I know this is what you really want as your gift, but honestly it is elusive. We recently scored a $1 million customer for one of our clients from a simple investment of $500 in a monthly Google search campaign.

While that’s exciting, it’s not common.

You might be looking for a direct ROI, but I’d suggest you look for a more indirect ROI. Many of the metrics we outlined in the previous section are indicators of success, and if they are going up and to the right every month, the revenue will follow.

Try to think about marketing more like you think about finance. You HAVE to do it and you have to do it well. If you do it month over month and align your investment with your goals, it will pay off in a reasonable amount of time.

If you start and stop, you might as well not do anything. Any time you stop doing marketing, you’ll regress to previous levels of performance.

So, while I’d love to give you a 100% ROI on all your investments in marketing as your gift, instead I’m giving you a healthier perspective on tracking marketing – one that is more activity based over time will produce the actual revenue you’re looking for from your investment in marketing.

Today, CEOs are faced with many challenges, but revenue generation and general business growth are among the more complex ones.

These gifts will go a long way in 2023 to make your favorite CEO more informed, more educated and more equipped to lead their companies.