Putting the Marketing Strategy from your V/TO to work

Putting the Marketing Strategy from your V/TO to work

by | Sep 6, 2023 | EOS, Marketing, Strategy

The four elements of the Marketing Strategy component of the Vision/Traction Organizer™ of the Entrepreneurial Operating System® provide a fantastic framework for growing your business. If you don’t remember off the top of your head, the four elements are:

  • Your target market/The list
  • 3 Uniques™
  • Your Proven Process
  • Your Guarantee

The first step in leveraging this framework is to ensure that you do a thorough job of documenting each one of the four elements. But that’s still just the beginning! As is the case with most of the EOS® tools, the power is in how you leverage these on an ongoing basis. How do you go about doing that? For starters, everyone in your organization should be able to recite each of the four elements at any given moment.

Below are some ideas as to how you can put the different elements in to work for you and your B2B business. A brief introduction for each is included, but I’m not going to spend much time talking about the elements themselves (your EOS Implementer® can help with that!).

Target Market/The List

The Target Market refers to the clients that are ideal fits for your business. This includes basic information like what industry they are in, what geography they are in, and other descriptive characteristics. In the B2B space, this should also include who the key players are inside of those businesses. Here’s some ideas around taking the next step in providing value to your Target Market and growing your business:

  • Your target market is identified and an ideal client profile is created that represents the businesses that are ideal fits for your products and services
  • Everyone in your business can communicate the profile of your ideal client and the desired outcomes that your organization delivers to those clients
  • Key functional contacts that work in businesses that fit your ideal client profile are identified and documented and the specific outcomes they desire are identified and documented
  • 100% of the organizations that fit your ideal client profile are identified in your CRM
  • 100% of key functional contacts within your ideal client organizations are identified in your CRM
  • A sales and marketing strategy is designed and documented with the goal of engaging with 100% of the key functional contacts within organizations that fit your ideal client profile
  • You are able to measure engagement levels with all of these functional contacts

3 Uniques™

Your 3 Uniques™ provide a high-level outline for what differentiates you from your competitors. While you may share a unique or two with other providers, your 3 Uniques™ should not be shared by any other business. Here are some thoughts around putting your 3 Uniques™ to work for you:

  • Your entire organization can articulate your 3 Uniques™ and why they matter to your ideal client
  • 3 Uniques™ are clearly represented in some way on your website
  • 3 Uniques™ come to life in all sales and marketing collateral
  • Your sales process is designed to leverage your 3 Uniques™
  • You have shareable case studies that show how your 3 Uniques™ are directly benefiting a client’s organization
  • Content that communicates the value of your 3 Uniques™ is regularly shared with your audience
  • Proposals are structured to clearly communicate how the 3 Uniques™ will benefit your prospects

Guarantee

Simply stated, your guarantee should remove the most significant barriers for your target market to do business with you and it should support your value proposition. Here are some things that you can do to ensure your guarantee is properly communicated to your target market:

  • Your guarantee clearly addresses and overcomes the most common challenge that prospects have in engaging with your business
  • Your guarantee clearly articulates the consequences of your company not fulfilling on your end of the guarantee
  • Your guarantee is communicated on the homepage of our website
  • Your guarantee is communicated on all sales proposals
  • You have referenceable examples where we a client leveraged your guarantee satisfactorily
  • Your guarantee is in the footer of your emails

Proven Process

Your Proven Process should provide context and clarity as to how your ideal clients will navigate their experience with your business. At Convergo, We see the Proven Process as a subset of the Ideal Client Experience. We feel strongly that the Ideal Client Experience is the foundation for aligning to your entire business to maximize the value that you provide to your clients. Here are some thoughts around the Proven Process in motion:

  • Your proven process has an internal brand and 100% of your team can recite your proven process and their role in the process
  • There is a external version of your proven process that shows prospects how they will engage with your business if they were to become a client
  • The sales and marketing arms of your organization are aligned around your proven process with the goal of creating an amazing client experience

We’d love to hear from all of you how you are bringing the marketing elements of your V/TO™ to life in your organization.

Tips for Developing an Effective Marketing Message

Tips for Developing an Effective Marketing Message

by | Apr 24, 2023 | Marketing

An effective marketing message is crucial for both business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) companies. It is the foundation on which your marketing strategy is built and can significantly impact your success. Your marketing message helps to communicate your value proposition, differentiate you from your competitors, and build brand awareness. In B2B, a clear marketing message is essential because the sales process is typically more complex and involves multiple stakeholders. A well-crafted message that clearly communicates the benefits of a product or service can help to persuade decision-makers and shorten the sales cycle. In B2C, a clear marketing message is equally important as consumers are bombarded with a vast amount of marketing noise. A clear message that resonates with the target audience can help to grab their attention, build trust, and ultimately lead to a purchase decision. In both cases, a clear marketing message helps to establish your brand identity and build a loyal customer base. The following tips will guide you through developing your effective marketing message.

Identify Your Ideal Clients 

Before you start developing your marketing message, you must understand your ideal clients. By identifying and understanding the ideal client profile (ICP), you can focus on targeting and helping businesses that align with your values and expertise, ultimately providing the best possible outcomes for your clients.

Once your ideal clients have been identified, it’s time to develop a value proposition.

Develop a Clear Value Proposition 

A value proposition is a statement that communicates the unique value that a company’s product or service provides to its customers. It is a promise that sets a business apart from its competitors and highlights the benefits that customers can expect to receive. Developing a value proposition is critical for both business-to-business and business-to-consumer companies. Your value proposition is a statement that communicates the outcomes you deliver to your ideal clients. It should be clear, concise, and easy to understand. It should focus on your product or service’s benefits rather than the features. To develop a strong value proposition, ask yourself what problem your product or service solves for your ideal clients and how it benefits them. Communicate your value proposition consistently across all your marketing and sales efforts.

Now that your ideal client has been identified and you know what you can offer those clients, the next step is understanding the process your clients will go through as they interact with your brand.

Map Out Your Client Journey 

Mapping out your client journey is essential for any business as it helps to understand how customers interact with your brand and where there may be gaps or opportunities to improve the customer experience. Companies that run on EOSTM might know this as their Proven Process. The client journey is the process that your ideal clients go through, from initial awareness to becoming a customer. A client journey map is a visual representation of each of the various stages that a customer goes through when engaging with a business. By mapping out your client journey, you can identify where your target audience is in the buying process and tailor your messaging and tactics to each stage. The client journey typically includes versions of the following stages: awareness, consideration, decision, and retention. Your messaging should remove friction by addressing your ideal client’s needs, pain points, and objections at each stage.

As you guide your client through their buying process with your brand, how should you communicate with them? Consistency in messaging is crucial through every stage of the journey.

Develop a Messaging Framework 

A messaging framework is a set of guidelines that speaks to your ideal clients. It includes defining your brand voice, messaging, and tone. This framework should be used by your sales and marketing team to ensure that everyone is using consistent messaging and speaking to your target audience in the same way. Your brand voice refers to the personality and values of your brand, while your messaging is the specific words and phrases you use to communicate your value proposition. Your tone is the emotional context in which your message is delivered.

Now that your voice and tone have been established, what are you going to say? There are so many forms of content out there, which ones will you benefit from the most?

Develop a Content Plan 

Content marketing is a great way to communicate your messaging to your target audience. Creating valuable, informative content that connects with your ideal client’s outcomes, needs, and pain points can establish your brand as a thought leader and build trust. Your content plan should include various content types, such as blog posts, social media posts, videos, infographics, and e-books. Be sure to align your content with your value proposition and messaging framework.

Once your content is out there, how do you know if it’s hitting the mark? The final step is knowing how your content is performing and figuring out how to adjust to make the most impact on your audience.

Test and Iterate 

Once you have developed your messaging, testing, and iterating is the final step. This means gathering feedback from your target audience and adjusting your messaging and tactics. This feedback loop is critical to continuously improving your marketing message and increasing its effectiveness. You can conduct surveys, focus groups, or A/B testing to test your messaging. Use your feedback to refine your value proposition, messaging, and content plan.

By following these tips, you can develop a clear and focused marketing message that resonates with your ideal clients and drives revenue growth for your business. Remember to stay focused on your ideal clients, develop a clear value proposition, map out your client journey, develop a messaging framework, create a content plan, and test and iterate your messaging to improve your marketing strategy continuously.

Scaling sales and growing revenue is essential for your business. We want to help you learn more. Click below to download our e-book today!

5 Steps For Sacaling Sales and Growth Revenue
The Secret to Scaling Sales and Growing Revenue: Ideal Client Profile

The Secret to Scaling Sales and Growing Revenue: Ideal Client Profile

by | Apr 17, 2023 | Marketing, Sales

As an entrepreneur, growing revenue and scaling sales is crucial to the success of your business. However, it can be challenging to achieve these goals if you don’t have a documented  Ideal Client Profile. This detailed description of your target customer will enable you to identify who your Ideal Prospects are and also serve as a filter to determine if a potential client will be a good fit. Knowing who your ideal clients are helps you pinpoint exactly where to focus your marketing efforts. When your marketing is pointed at those most likely to purchase what you’re offering, you have the most potential for sales growth.

Identifying Your Ideal Client Profile

Your ideal client profile (ICP) is not a one-size-fits-all solution. Ideal Clients are an intersection of the clients that:

  • You are operationally optimized to serve
  • Are the most valuable to your business
  • Align with your team and values.

The high-level components of an ICP are:

  • Description: One or two sentences that describe the characteristics of the companies who are a perfect fit for your solution.
  • Data Points: This includes demographic data such as size of the company, including number of employees and revenue, location, and other specific company traits.
  • Primary Personas: A primary persona is a fictional representation of your ideal clients based on market research and real data about your existing clients. At the very least, it should include: motivations, role goals, pain points, and preferred communication channels. The more specific and detailed your buyer persona is, the better you’ll be able to understand your target audience and tailor your marketing and sales approach to meet their needs.

Documenting your Ideal Client Profile (ICP) should enable you to pull “The List,” which is the actual businesses that meet the criteria in the ICP.  This should be an addressable market for your sales and marketing efforts.  If The List is too broad, reel in the data points on the ICP.  Then, you can operationalize your ICP to realize the following benefits:

The Role of an Ideal Client Profile in Scaling Sales and Growing Revenue

Once you’ve put the proper plan into action to develop your ICP, what results should you expect? What benefits come from identifying your ideal client?

Focuses your Sales and Marketing Energy and Spend

Spending time and money without focusing on an ideal Client is wasteful. Once you have an addressable market, 100% of your sales and marketing spend and energy can be focused on ideal prospects and clients instead of diluting the spend on the wrong prospects for your business.

Improves Your Message

Your ICP includes your target personas and their desired outcomes. Having a more narrow ICP enables you to craft a message more likely to resonate with your ideal clients and prospects. So, when your prospects see your message, they are more likely to engage.

Enhances Your Client Satisfaction

Depending on your business, when your sales and marketing efforts bring on the wrong clients, operational challenges can be created.  Your team should be operationally optimized to serve ideal clients in an efficient and effective manner.  So naturally, bringing on ideal clients improves client satisfaction.

Increases Your Revenue

Focusing your sales and marketing energy, improving your message, and enhancing client satisfaction will of course lead to revenue growth. Moreover, satisfied customers are more likely to refer others to your business, leading to a steady stream of new customers and revenue.

By identifying your ideal clients, you can better target your sales and marketing efforts and generate more revenue for your business.

Developing an ideal client profile is essential for any business looking to scale its sales and grow its revenue. It helps you focus on serving businesses that align with your values and expertise, ultimately providing the best possible outcomes for your clients. Following these tips, you can describe your ideal client and develop targeted marketing and sales strategies to reach them effectively. The next step to scaling your sales and growing your revenue is focusing on your messaging, which we will explore in the next blog.

To learn more, download our ebook, “5 Steps for Scaling Sales and Growing Revenue”, today!

5 Steps For Sacaling Sales and Growth Revenue
Using Your Scorecard To Help Your People

Using Your Scorecard To Help Your People

by | Mar 29, 2023 | Marketing

Once you are tracking the right metrics, The success of any scorecard is limited by the actions you or do not take when you review the numbers.  We discussed a few key points in our recent blog: Things your scorecard tells you about your business:

  • Developing a mature scorecard is a challenging but worthwhile journey to enable you to take your business to the next level.
  • There are three areas to consider when improving metrics: People, Message, and Processes.

This blog is a deeper dive into actions to help develop your people if they aren’t hitting their numbers. 

Let’s look at a sales team as a use case to see what actions you can take to help improve your numbers.   The goals may vary depending on the experience or ability of the sales reps, but all of the sales team members with the same responsibilities should have the same metrics. 

If one team member is not performing, there are three different paths forward. You can:

  1. Help them level up
  2. Move them to a different seat
  3. Move them out of the business.

Helping them level up is the first logical path for a rep trending in the wrong direction.  The EOS® GWC™ concept is a great framework to help you determine what is going on:

  • Do they get it?
  • Do they want it?
  • Do they have the capacity to do it?

Getting to the root cause of the problem and a mutual agreement on the action items to take is the key to helping people take the proper corrective action to improve. Let’s look at Get It, Want It, and Capacity to do it as a tool to analyze the possible actions for People.  

Get it

Ideal state is that everyone deeply understands of their position and what they need to do to drive the desired results.  “Getting it” depends on the person as well as the complexity of the position. As it says in this EOS Blog, if a person does not “Get it,” there is not much you can do.

Want it

People are motivated in many ways, and there are many possible motivational factors at play here, for example:

  • Sense of purpose
  • Company culture
  • Relationship with leaders
  • Relationship with co-workers
  • Recognition
  • Opportunity for growth
  • Personal life
  • Compensation 

Leaders can try to understand what may be the cause here through effective questioning and coaching discussions.  Taking the proper corrective action might not be as easy as the “Get it” challenge because some of these items might be beyond the leader’s control.  Sometimes people just don’t want it.

Capacity

Capacity is about having the mental, emotional, physical, and time capacity to do the work. The good news with capacity is that sometimes this is solvable, and you can take action to improve capacity.  If the issue is time capacity, then the solution is easy: take some things off their plate!

If it is a different issue, then the key to taking appropriate action is to understand the root cause and take appropriate action to develop them. Once you know the root cause, point them to learning resources to help them build their skills.  Examples of resources include internal or external training resources, industry, or functional content. 

Let’s take a look at an example and look at what you might do if a sales rep is presenting the required number of proposals but is not closing any of them.  

Symptom: Sales rep is not hitting their proposal win rate number.

Root Cause: Upon looking at the proposals they are presenting, you realize that the rep is not capturing the client’s specific goals and needs into the proposal. So you explore further with the rep and find that they do not understand the client’s business goals and challenges during the early stages of the sales process. 

Corrective action:  Point them to some resources to help them to sharpen their questioning and listening skills and continue to help them improve in that area.

Conclusion

When tracking the right metrics on your scorecard, it is a lot easier to take the right action.  When it comes to people, the key to improvement is ensuring you get to the root cause of the issue and take corrective action.

[Webinar] The Buyer’s Journey: Optimize Engagement to Maximize Revenue Results

[Webinar] The Buyer’s Journey: Optimize Engagement to Maximize Revenue Results

by | Jun 1, 2022 | Marketing

Darrell Amy had the privilege to participate as a panelist on Authentic Brand’s webinar. In this webinar you will learn:

  • Why defining ideal customer personas is essential
  • Best practices for designing your buyer’s journey
  • Where customer experiences tend to fall short, and how not to miss key opportunities
  • How to operationalize your buyer’s journey through sales and marketing alignment
  • Why customers aren’t the only buyers that matter to your business health

Watch below!

5 Ways to Create a Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy

5 Ways to Create a Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy

by | Apr 22, 2022 | Marketing

Written by Angela Pointon, 11outof11.com

Lead Nurturing Strategies: Warm Up Prospects and Book More Sales Meetings

Today’s companies are looking to find, keep, and enjoy closer relationships with their customers through lead nurturing. This strategy helps businesses guide more high-quality leads through the marketing funnel on their way to becoming customers.

According to HubSpot’s Ultimate List of Marketing Statistics for 2022, converting leads into customers is a top priority for almost 75% of companies. Yet many fall short of nurturing their existing customers beyond the first purchase (81% only use early-stage lead nurturing tactics). No matter where your customers are on their journey, you need to be ready with great lead nurturing ideas to ensure the success of your business.

Here’s more evidence in support of comprehensive lead nurturing:

  • According to one survey, 48%of businesses say most of their leads require a long sales cycle of nurturing to convert.
  • Content marketing is generating more leads than traditional marketing strategies for 93% of B2B companies.
  • Email content marketing has been an effective channel for early-stage lead generation for 53% of marketers.
  • Because landing pages offer personalized, relevant content that audiences relate better to, 68% of B2B companies are using them on websites to nurture new sales leads for future conversion.
  • For 53% of marketers, webinars are the top-of-the-funnel format that generates the most high-quality leads.
  • Businesses that nurture prospects with content that’s relevant to where they are in the buying process are achieving 72% higher conversion rates.

5 Ways to Create a Successful Lead Nurturing Strategy

In this article, guest expert Angela Pointon, president of 11outof11, shares five ideas for creating lead nurturing that will help ensure your next campaign is a success.

  1. Know who to nurture

The people who need nurturing are your ideal customers. Define them and get to know them. Explore all of the different types of your customers, not just one.

  1. Leave the sales pitch for later

The way that lead nurturing supports and encourages your customers through the sales funnel is a soft sell, by design. Offer your customers something they can value first, so they can get ready to buy. Leave the sales pitch for later. Consider a whitepaper, an in-depth eBook, a new webinar ,or leveraging one of your existing assets that has been successful in converting leads.

  1. Think about why you’re sending an email

After determining the content that’s relevant for each of your customer types, create a purpose for each email related to the specific stages of the buyer’s journey or how your brand meets their current needs.

  1. Don’t rush a sale

For a lead nurturing campaign to be effective, time your emails to coincide with your business’s typical sales cycle. Send at least two or three nurturing emails spaced out over the length of your sales cycle to avoid rushing into a sale.

  1. Test campaigns and analyze your success

Experiment with different email subject lines including preview text, test your offers, and craft specific calls-to-action for each email in your campaign. Keep improving on them with an eye toward better nurturing of leads and more lead-to-customer conversions.

Want more ideas? Look through the leading nurturing category of 11outof11’s blog for articles on creating more sales qualified leads, how to target prospects who work remotely, and more.

Connect with 11outof11

Are you creating the right content? Is it optimized for getting as many conversions as possible? Book a 30-minute content assessment with 11outof11 and gain:

  • Topics and ideas for content your ideal persona needs
  • Ways to make your content more visible to search engines
  • Methods to implement immediately to get your content to convert into leads

Contact us to learn more.

About the authorHeadshot of Angela Pointon

Angela Pointon is an author, speaker, authority marketing expert, and president of 11outof11, an award-winning digital content marketing firm for small businesses. Certified as a woman-owned business with the Women’s Business Enterprise National Council (WBENC), 11outof11 is a preferred marketing agency for companies running on EOS® and similar operating systems, recognized as a HubSpot Platinum Partner based on client success, and one of Philadelphia’s fastest-growing companies by Philadelphia100®. 11outof11 continuously offers exceptional content marketing services, super-fast communication, and detailed progress updates for growth-focused companies in the greater Philadelphia area and beyond. Visit https://www.11outof11.com for more information.