The Revenue RAMP - How to Jump-Start Your Demand Engine to Accelerate Revenue

2020. The year the world stopped turning. Businesses and schools shut down. Millions of employees moved from captive office environments to working from home overnight. We stopped traveling. Economies came to a screeching halt as many companies and consumers stopped spending money on anything that was viewed as non-essential. For those that continued to spend out of necessity, buying behaviors changed dramatically. Cash became king as we all sought to weather the storm brought on by the pandemic.

A perfect storm for marketers. Experienced, talented, respected marketers lost their jobs or dealt with significant budget cuts. Marketers that retained their positions and protected their budgets faced a real crisis of confidence, paralyzed by the fear of making the wrong decisions leading them to suspend marketing initiatives waiting for the world to quickly reopen. (That quick recovery never came.) Some marketers doubled down on what they had already planned even if it no longer aligned with what buyers needed. While other marketers waited for everything to return to normal, a few bold marketers seized the opportunity to hit the reset button, refresh their strategies, and place new bets to leapfrog their competitors.

When the world stopped turning, I did a few things. First, I made sure that my own organization’s house was in order, accelerated the investments that would fix all leaks in our funnel, support our customers’ new buying process and enable our salesforce to shift from in-person to virtual conversations and events. While we were making the right investments and accelerating the work that would have the greatest impact, I reached out to my peers to understand what they were going to do to weather the storm. I also tuned into what the world’s leading research analyst firms were sharing to help marketers respond to the rapidly changing economic environment. I consumed everything—looking for any magic bullets that would make it easier to lead through the craziness. I wanted to make sure that we didn’t miss any opportunity to support the business and return to growth. I quickly realized two things. First, there is no such thing as a magic bullet. Secondly, the framework I’ve used repeatedly to transform marketing functions into revenue engines seemed to be the very thing marketers would need to lead their company’s recovery and return to growth. Knowing that many marketers would be looking for help, I decided to publish this book that I started writing many years ago. While I don’t know you, I suspect you’ve checked this book out for the very reasons that I finally decided to publish it:

You are under a lot of pressure from senior executives to do more to help Sales to accelerate your organization’s return to growth. You know the answer cannot simply be “do more” and even if you had more to give, you’re worried that you wouldn’t be able to prove that Marketing was a driver of that growth.

Even though there are already tons of marketing leads that are being dropped, mishandled, or ignored altogether, you are being pushed to ­generate more leads to fuel an increasingly weak sales pipeline.

While sales leaders are more open to working with you out of desperation, it feels like they expect you to be their sales support versus what you are, which is a critical driver of the business.

Your team has resorted to doing more low-cost marketing activities that tend to generate lower quality leads simply to get some short-term relief from the pressure.

Your team is starting to show signs that they are stretched too thin because of the increasing ­number of support requests from Sales.

Finance has reduced or frozen your budget at least once this year to bring costs in line with declining revenue driven by the challenging economic downturn. Those budget cuts may have resulted in the need to lay off some of your team or terminate an agency contract.

On top of the budget cuts or freezes, you may have also lost precious marketing dollars on event cancellations.

As you develop your marketing plan, you believe that your budget will either be flat or reduced to keep costs in line with expected revenues. Despite a potential flat or decreased budget, you expect that your key performance goals will be raised to help the business return to growth. Effectively, you are being asked to do more with fewer resources.

The reliability of your marketing reports and the quality of marketing-generated leads have been called into question— may have even been blamed for the weak pipeline and missed forecasts.

Because of all these things, you are beginning to worry that you are losing credibility as a business driver and that your organization is now viewed as a cost center.

Does any of this sound familiar? Does this describe you and your situation? If so, this book is perfect for you.

According to Forrester research, top performing organizations convert less than 1.54% of leads into revenue. As if that wasn’t bad enough, underperforming organizations convert less than 0.38% of leads!1 Consequently, it’s not surprising to hear that less than half the CFOs McKinsey surveyed believe that Marketing delivers on the promise of driving growth, and 40% don’t think marketing investments should be protected during a downturn2. These findings were further validated by Gartner’s recent surveys of CFOs indicating marketing budgets were cut by 11-25% in 2020 and that further cuts can be expected if businesses don’t rebound heading into 2021.3 The takeaway: If Marketing wants to be viewed as a business driver and profit center, we’ve got to generate a stronger return on our investments. The best way to do that is to improve the conversion of the demand you’re already creating.

If you follow the steps outlined in this book, you and your team will quickly build a Revenue RAMP to enable your business to return to growth. This book will help you find and fix the leaks in your revenue pipeline, change Sales’ perception of Marketing and the leads that Marketing generates, unlock the true potential of your marketing organization, and become omnipresent for your buyers with always-on digital marketing programs.

Let’s talk about what happens after you’ve done this work. What will it feel like to be a marketer who is viewed as a critical business driver for their organization?

As much as I’d love to tell you that it’s all rainbows, unicorns, life-changing promotions, and unlimited marketing budgets, that’s a fantasy. Yes, it may happen for a small number of marketers but so does winning the lottery. I wouldn’t place any bets on it.

But that’s OK because the reality of what happens is much more rewarding. I know. I’ve seen it happen before, and I’ve experienced it in my own career.

It usually unfolds like this:

• First, you start to notice sales reps acknowledging that lead quality has measurably improved. The noise about Marketing filling their pipeline with junk leads starts to disappear from weekly commercial calls.
• Then, you notice sales highlighting key wins in the quarterly business reviews that were either sourced or heavily influenced by Marketing (and no one questions the data that proves that fact).
• Sales performance begins to rebound—sales velocity and conversion increase, resulting in more wins and quota achievement.
• Sales starts to ask Marketing for account insights as part of their territory or account planning process.
• Product and Sales leaders make sure that you and key members of your team are included in strategy and business planning sessions because you are viewed as a critical contributor to the discussion and the business, whereas, in the past, you were viewed as optional.
• The business returns to pre-pandemic revenue performance and sees signs of a return to profitable growth.
• You’re able to prove, without controversy or doubt, that every dollar invested in Marketing, drives profitable, predictable, reliable revenue.
• When revenue pressure appears in the business, your CFO stops turning to Marketing first to look for ways to take costs out of the business.
• Marketing is viewed and highlighted as a competitive differentiator in earnings calls and annual reports.
• Your team feels empowered, valued, and impactful given the role they played in returning the business to growth.
• Your peers describe you as a unifying, collaborative partner who treats their team with respect.
• You feel trusted, respected, and greatly valued by your CEO, CFO and board of directors.
• If you share your team’s success story externally, the transformational change you led for your organization may even be acknowledged by unbiased industry analysts.
• You’ll start to attract extraordinarily talented marketers who want to work for and learn from you.
• Your KPIs evolve from lead quantity and cost per lead to demand conversion, marketing sourced and influenced revenues, and return on marketing...