The Convergo Approach Series: The Lens of Ideal Client Experience

by Bill Poole | Jan 6, 2021 | Strategy

The Convergo Approach Series

Part 1: The Difference Between Convergo and a Marketing Agency
Part 2: A Strategic Approach
Part 3: The Lens of the Ideal Client Experience
Part 4: Sales and Marketing Integration
Part 5: Sales and Marketing Processes

Considering the experience that your prospects and clients have with your business is a very good lens to use when you’re deciding where to invest in sales and marketing. We call this the Ideal Client Experience. This process is two steps:

1. Documenting your Ideal Client Profile: Ensuring the Ideal Client is clearly defined
2. Mapping out your Ideal Client Experience: Looking at the entire experience that an Ideal Client has with your business.

Ideal Client Profile

Most clients that we work with have a good idea who their ideal client is. Ideal clients are those that can take advantage of everything you have to offer.

As we work through the workshop process, clients often realize that their definition of an ideal client may be too broad. This makes it very difficult to create effective messaging and content that will connect with your ideal clients and also very challenging to get on their radar. Here are a couple of helpful resources about your ideal client profile:

• 3 Filters for Your Ideal Client Profile
• The Power of “The List” to Grow Revenue Faster

When the ideal client is further refined, the value proposition can often be improved. We recently worked with a financial services company on a Revenue Growth Plan. When we worked through clarifying their Ideal Client Profile, they had the lightbulb moment that our clients often experience.

Initially, they wanted to hire a marketing person to get more leads. Going through our process helped them realize that the quickest way to achieve revenue growth (which is their overall goal) was to expand their share of wallet with their existing clients. Interestingly, this shift in thinking helped them decide to leverage existing educational resources for their clients to better serve them.

In the end, the value proposition to their clients is improved, enabling them to sell more to their current client base instead of hiring a marketing person right out of the gate to generate more leads. The next step is to make an investment in a marketing person to leverage this enhanced value proposition. The result? More QUALIFIED leads that are aligned with their Ideal Client Profile.

A tight value proposition targeted at a well-defined ideal client is a must before executing on a marketing strategy whether you are using an agency or doing your own marketing.

Mapping Out Your Ideal Client Experience

Taking the time to map out the experience that your ideal client has with your business is a very valuable exercise. That experience begins when your ideal prospect has a problem that you might be able to help with and ends when they are enjoying all of your products and services. The documentation of each stage that your prospect/client goes through is what we call the Ideal Client Experience (or ICX). Here are a couple of considerations to keep in mind when mapping out this experience:

1. Ensure you think about it from the lens of your client and not from your internal sales or delivery process. Thinking about how clients feel in each stage and the friction that they might experience is a great framework for improvement. This lens allows you to be more objective in considering a sales and marketing direction. It often brings operations into the equation as well as they obviously have a significant role in maximizing the client experience.
2. Do not have any pre-dispositions as to where you can make the biggest impact. More on why below.

More often than not, businesses come to us thinking they need more top-funnel marketing leads to drive revenue growth. 2 thought-starter questions on this topic:

• How many of your clients actually fit your Ideal Client Profile (Read: They can take advantage of everything you offer)?
• What percentage of your ideal clients actually are enjoying all of the products and services that you offer? Follow up question: Why is your number so low?

Like the financial services company mentioned above, looking at the ideal client experience also helps prioritize where you can make the biggest impact the soonest. In addition, one significant advantage of looking at the ideal client experience to support your investment in sales and marketing is that it becomes a lot easier to measure than traditional marketing spend.

The Convergo Approach Series: A Strategic Approach

by Bill Poole | Jan 4, 2021 | Strategy

The Convergo Approach Series

Part 1: The Difference Between Convergo and a Marketing Agency
Part 2: A Strategic Approach
Part 3: The Lens of the Ideal Client Experience
Part 4: Sales and Marketing Integration
Part 5: Sales and Marketing Processes

There’s no better way to secure a long-lasting working relationship than by pursuing common goals. A good example of that concept in motion is a recent decision that I had to make my home look better. I previously contracted with someone to mow my lawn. I don’t particularly enjoy mowing lawns so I was initially happy with the fact that I didn’t have to. But over time, I became frustrated that my home did not look as good as it could.

In an effort to fix that, I decided to take a look at this decision a bit closer and realized that my goal was not just to have my lawn mowed, but to have a home that looked great on the outside without my having to worry about it.

In the end, I decided on a service provider that shared my goal of making my home look great. Sure it was more money, but they do a lot more and the results are much better!

At Convergo, it is not our goal to provide marketing services for you. It is our goal to help you reach your revenue goals. So, our engagements start with a Revenue Growth Plan that looks something like this:

1. We align with your revenue goals and business/scorecard metrics.
2. We define or refine your Ideal Client Profile.
3. We map out your Ideal Client Experience- The experience that your Ideal Client has as they navigate with your business from the time they have a problem that you can help with to the time they are enjoying everything you can do for them.
4. We develop a high-level roadmap around your Ideal Client Experience to achieve your goals.

Everything we do is centered on shared goals and metrics that ultimately impact your overall business revenue goals.

The Convergo Approach Series: What’s the Difference Between Convergo and a Marketing Agency?

by Bill Poole | Dec 17, 2020 | Strategy

Marketing agencies help you execute a plan. Or, in the absence of a plan, they create pretty things for you like websites, videos, and brochures. Most of the time, this doesn’t have much to do with your sales team or your company goals.

Convergo helps you create the plan that integrates marketing and sales to drive revenue growth. Then, we coach your team to execute it inside your EOS meeting cadence.

It’s kind of like the last time that I made a decision to join a gym. I knew I had to make a decision because my gym membership at the time was expiring and working out is a key part of my life.

There were many different options to consider. Some gyms have more cardio equipment, others have more classes or free weights. Some are closer to me than others. Although there are a lot of differentiators, comparing traditional gyms is basically an apples-to-apples comparison.

Another option that surfaced was to join a Comprehensive Health Club. In addition to having all of the different amenities that the different gyms offered, health consulting was also included. In addition to weights and cardio equipment, the Comprehensive Health Club offered wellness counseling which included things like nutrition and holistic health. When I compared it to the other gyms, this was clearly NOT an apples-to-apples comparison.

Many businesses in the B2B space contemplate their investment in marketing similarly to the initial road I went down to join a gym for one of two primary reasons:

1. They know they need to make some sort of investment in marketing. Many times, they don’t know who or what they want, but they know they need to invest.
2. They are frustrated with their current marketing agency because they are not providing them with enough leads. They struggle to justify their investment in the agency given the complicated metrics that the agency provides for them because they are not tied to the goals of the company.

The decision to invest in a marketing agency is similar to my initial decision to join a gym. What I want is to live a long, healthy, enjoyable life. Similarly, the end goal with making an investment in marketing is to have healthy and sustainable revenue growth.

When they get to know what we do at Convergo in contrast to a marketing agency, they quickly realize that they are looking at an apples-to-oranges decision. At Convergo, we approach things very differently than marketing agencies do. Four primary differences in our approach are:

1. A Strategic Approach: We are metric-driven and start with the revenue goals of the organization
2. The Lens of the Ideal Client Experience: We look at the entire client experience, not just the top of the funnel.
3. Sales Integration: We believe marketing and sales should be aligned and working together.
4. Sales and Marketing Processes: We implement documented sales and marketing processes, creating infrastructure inside your business to support long-term revenue growth.

We detail each of these 4 differentiators in this blog series.

Part 1: The Difference Between Convergo and a Marketing Agency
Part 2: A Strategic Approach
Part 3: The Lens of the Ideal Client Experience
Part 4: Sales and Marketing Integration
Part 5: Sales and Marketing Processes

Why Alignment is Key to Change and Adoption

by Lisa Dalton | Nov 25, 2020 | Strategy

You may be asking yourself why you should stop and align with your team before you get going on quarterly projects. This is a great question! Your people are the heart and soul of your organization and projects. When starting any new project or initiating any change, your team will have questions like:

• Why the organization is undertaking a Revenue Growth Plan and how does it relate to them?
• What is the objective of the project?
• What is my role?
• What is going to change for me and my other teammates?
• What do I need to do?
• How much time will it take?

If your team doesn’t have answers to these questions, the projects in the quarterly sprints won’t be as effective, smooth or timely. Additionally, without understanding their role within the process, your team may not fully adopt the change being made

We want to make sure whatever changes are made fit into your organization. To meet the overall objective of growing revenue and aligning sales and marketing, we need to understand how changes will affect people, process, tools and messaging so we can grow.

What is the Quickest Way to Grow Revenue?

by Bill Poole | Oct 13, 2020 | Strategy

We are in the business of helping EOS® companies grow revenue. Over half of the businesses that come to us with that goal in mind are wanting to do so by generating more leads.

As we work with clients to develop an initial Revenue Growth Plan, it typically becomes clear that the quickest way to move the needle on revenue growth is by focusing on their clients, not on generating new leads.

Compare this to the process of dating. There are two primary outcomes for a single person to date:

1. Long term: To find a long-term partner to share their life with
2. Short term: Sharing time with different people that may have different interests and perspectives, but without needing to share the same long-term goal

Having spent my adult life on both sides of this coin, I see that both have their merits. I enjoyed the process of dating itself, and I am now happily married. If you’re looking for a long-term partner in life, it is important to find someone with that same goal in mind and it’s even more important to find someone that shares the same vision as to what a long-term partner in life really is. This is not as important for those that are just looking to enjoy dating.

In the interest of self-awareness, it is valuable for the dater to begin with the end in mind and know which one of these outcomes they are pursuing when they are dating.

So how does dating relate to revenue growth? The leads are like dates. Are you looking for leads for the sake of dating, or are you looking for leads that share your vision of what a long-term relationship with a client is like? If you’re trying to build a sustainable business, the long-term approach makes a lot more sense; it’s a lot less expensive and a lot more fun. According to Bain & Company, a 5% increase in retention results in a 25-95% increase in profitability.

In our Revenue Growth Workshops, we help our clients look at the entire experience that a prospect or client has with their business — from the time the prospect knows they have a problem to the time that they become a client and are enjoying all of the services and solutions that our clients have to offer them. Businesses that initially think they need more leads typically realize that:

1. The most efficient way to grow revenue is to look at increasing their value to their current client base
2. The experience that they are introducing leads into is not optimized to win, retain, and scale efficiently.

Prioritizing what to do first is a very important decision. If you decide that you want to start bringing in more leads before you optimize the whole experience that they will go through, it can be very expensive and frustrating in the long run.

More often than not, we end up helping clients improve the experience that their current customers have with their business before looking to generate more top-of-funnel leads. Once the client experience is improved and optimized, not only can you generate more business from those current clients, but you’re also ready to close and retain the leads that you bring in.

Back to the dating analogy, if you are pursuing a long term partner, but don’t have a good vision as to what life looks like in that scenario, it might be difficult to find the right partner, and even more challenging to achieve long-term happiness.