A ton of digital marketing agencies call themselves growth agencies, revenue growth agencies or revenue agencies. But the reality is they’re just digital marketing shops in revenue growth clothing.
Don’t be fooled. Know specifically what you should be looking for if you’re considering hiring a company to help your business grow revenue.
After more than 20 years of working with companies struggling to grow, I’ve uncovered the four areas that any revenue growth agency needs to address, and I’m sharing them here for the first time.
Marketing gets the burden of having to lift the entire company story to the level where it becomes so compelling, so emotional and so disruptive that people are talking about you. This is the essence of marketing strategy.
In addition to this story, your marketing strategy has to ensure your targeting criteria and personas are well defined and prioritized. You also need clear alignment around your investment threshold and expected results. All this must be created as part of your marketing strategy work.
Next, you need to have the right marketing tactics, both foundational tactics like your website and lead-generating tactics like paid social, paid search or email marketing.
These tactics need to be orchestrated into highly personalized and omnichannel campaigns that run as part of a process including ongoing optimization to improve performance over time.
You’re going to need the right resources, including people in your company who can create the strategy, spin up the tactics, optimize the campaigns, automate the execution, analyze the data and be accountable for results.
If you don’t have the right resources here, consider outside options to supplement your existing team. If you don’t have any resources, look for a partner to outsource the entire effort.
You’re also going to need the right processes to ensure this effort works seamlessly day after day. This usually means having:
With your marketing humming along, you’re going to quickly realize you don’t have enough sales reps or the right reps to turn these leads into new customers. More strategically, you should start to realize that just like marketing, you need systems and processes to keep your sales team staffed correctly.
First, you should be continuously recruiting for sales. The turnover rate in sales organizations is pushing 40% in 2024, which means you’ll need to replace some reps. If you start looking now, this might not be so painful later.
Once you recruit reps, you need to onboard them. Who in your organization is going to be accountable for and have the time to onboard new sales reps?
You’re going to have to arm them with technology – such as your CRM, Zoom and LinkedIn – and train them. This too takes time and attention.
What about assessing their current skill sets and making sure you know where additional help or support might be needed? This is an issue we see in many new sales rep onboarding processes. Companies throw the new reps into the bullpen and expect them to sell, and it’s a recipe for failure.
Once they’re onboarded, reps still need mentoring, monitoring, coaching and guidance to reach a state of high productivity. This too is a full-time job and requires a unique set of skills. Add to that the rewards, recognition and contests required to get salespeople to perform, and you have a big lift on your hands.
This is why you should consider outsourcing the entire effort. Today, companies can provide quick turns on almost any industry with vetted sales reps who are ready to go. Move all the burden described above to someone else, and you reap the reward of new reps making calls, producing new opportunities and winning new business.
If you like the reps and want to hire them, work with a company that allows you to move the best reps to your team, and you finally have a systematic approach to scaling your sales team.
Sales reps require ongoing care and training. You can’t leave them in the wild to fend for themselves. You should be nurturing a sales culture inside your company that supports reps with all the tools, techniques and resources they need to be successful.
This includes creating a sales process everyone follows religiously. It’s the only way to get metrics on sales performance and optimize the sales process over time. Improving your sales process is the fastest way to revenue growth, and it requires teaching reps a specific sales methodology and reinforcing it over time.
This might mean creating a series of open-ended questions that reps use across the sales process or having a commitment-based process that guides prospects to say yes.
It’s important to monitor and measure their performance not on sales training session attendance but on performance metrics that show they’re mastering the techniques and improving their ability to move prospects to a successful close.
Finally, this is all too much for anyone to do on their own. You need a single platform, like HubSpot for both marketing and sales technology, to automate and analyze as much as possible.
The more you automate, the faster your campaigns will execute and the better your sales rep follow-up will be – both improvements will shorten your sales cycle and improve the overall company close rate.
The more you analyze, the more insights you’ll uncover buried in your data, and the better your insights, the more informed your action plans will be. This means your marketing and sales execution will improve faster and start to dramatically impact overall company revenue results.
But what makes this even more exciting is that it’s all part of a system that can be scaled, repeated and used to produce predictable results.
Finally, your company has a revenue generation system to help you grow, hit your sales numbers every month and gain confidence in your team’s ability to drive revenue.