Funnel Reboot

How come the companies you hear boasting about their growth rarely seem to rack up impressive growth numbers? For all those that talk the talk, very few can say they have doubled their revenue in the last 3 years. And yet, according to our guest today, by simply increasing new sales by 15%/yr and selling 15% more per year to existing clients, doubling revenue is totally achievable.

In the 27 years since he graduated with his MBA, Darrell Amy has worked  heavily in the tech sector, mainly in sales and marketing. Wanting to help a larger number of companies, in 2004 he started his own business, speaking and acting as a fractional Chief Revenue Officer. In 2020, Darrell authored Revenue Growth Engine book  How To Align Sales & Marketing To Accelerate Growth.

He is a member of the Forbes Business Council and co-chair of the Kingdom Missions Fund. Based in Arkansas, with a family that now includes a couple of grand-children, let’s go talk to Darrell Amy.  

Darrell’s personal site

Revenue Growth podcast

Selling from the Heart podcast which Darrell co-hosts 

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Jon Ferrera of GoldMine & Nimble

Tiffani Bova

Jay Abraham

Keith Eades author of The New Solution Selling

Brent Adamson co-author of The Challenger Sale

Theodore Levitt

Seth Godin

Donald J Miller’s “Storybrand”

Episode Reboot – get Darrell’s Revenue Growth Engine audiobook free by filling out this form or by texting ‘revenue’ to 21000

The relationship between those who generate creative work and the rest of us in revenue-related roles can be …strained. From those I’ve talked to in graphics or visual arts, being left to their lonesome makes it hard producing creative that’s exactly what the marketers and other stakeholders wanted. 

That’s one reason why I hope you listen to today’s talk with a graphic designer who wrote a guide for other graphic designers.  To help your interactions with your creative counterparts. 

The other reason is this author’s healthy outlook…on everything. I was first exposed to how zen-like he was when I met him at an event in 2017. Reading LinkedIn updates over the next few years I marveled how he did everything at his design agency, his training business and his college lecturing. When we met again (virtually) in 2020 , he talked about everything he had going on, but in that same calm tone. 

So by the time he came out with his second book this last year – “Stop Looking for Zebras”, I seized the chance to let you hear his unique viewpoint for yourself. 

Let’s go hear from our guest Robert Smith who will explain the book’s title, and much much more.

People/Products/Concepts Mentioned in Show

Robert’s firm Think-Smith

Registered Graphic Designer designation

Steven Pressfield, “Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be“

Don’t be bugged when accolades don’t come. Bryan Adams called his second album https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/You_Want_It_You_Got_It but had originally wanted it called “Bryan Adams hasn’t heard of you either!”

Episode Reboot.  If you’re stuck on something creative, use Robert’s catchphrase: ‘Let it go, Picasso’

“So, what does your company do?”

This is a simple question, which should have a simple answer. Yet whenever I’m asked it, I feel the tug to drift into a talk-track full of feature dumps. 

This, and other sales sins, lead to situations that lose potential sales. They put all of marketing’s hard work at risk of going to waste. Meticulously-crafted content, research on ICPs and  intent-based campaigns aimed at key Accounts can all be for naught if sales doesn’t have a game-plan for their conversation with the prospect.

It is at this point that companies seek the help of our guest 

After getting his Ph.D. at Stanford Brent Keltner spent ten years as a social scientist at the RAND Corporation. 

While he liked using his academic training, he looked for places his knowledge could be more practically applied.  Jumping to enterprise and early stage companies, he found gaps in their revenue function. But also found he could get sales teams unstuck from specific challenges with a bit of theoretical modeling. 

After more than a decade of experience as a revenue leader, he founded Winalytics LLC, a go-to-market and revenue consultancy whose clients include DealerRater, Lexmark, and Ascend Learning. He continued developing his list of situations and corresponding plays, which led to the publishing of his collection of The Revenue Acceleration Playbook which Brent came out with in 2022. 

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Brent on LinkedIn

Salesforce

Author Todd Caponi

Author Neil Rackham

Buyer First, by Carol Mahoney

Marcus Sheridan books

Socratic method

Episode Reboot. 

Brent freely offers the first chapter of the book at AuthenticityWins.com

In this episode, I spoke with Danny Decker about the book he co-wrote with RJon Robins, “The Automatic Marketing Machine” which came out in 2022. The book combines direct marketing, nurturing emails and retention tactics to form a sustainable supply of ready-to-buy leads.

Danny Decker spent most of his childhood in West Africa, where his parents were missionaries. When he was young, he saw people spending a large portion of their day getting water. In a similar way, businesses struggle to get a steady supply of prospects, even though leads are as important to business owners as water.  In their frantic bid to fill their funnel, they commit random acts of marketing, looking to Danny just like the villagers that he once watched use up precious energy, spending much of their time on just subsisting.

He is based in Huntersville, NC with his wife, two kids, and a hyperactive German shepherd. Through the Automatic Marketing Agency, Danny now shows businesses how to secure their prospect-supply by building marketing systems that work to help businesses reach their full potential. 

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The Automatic Marketing Machine book

Danny on LinkedIn

Danny Decker Marketing

Danny’s Podcast (2018-2021)

Unbounce

Building a Storybrand book by Donald Miller

Episode Reboot. 

The five-step marketing automation email sequence: 

1. Instant response, delivering the resource that the prospect requested. (This is the email we’ve already reviewed earlier in this chapter.)
2. Send two days after the first email, following up to ensure the prospect got the resource, asking if they have any questions, and providing a link to schedule their appointment or visit your store.
3. Send three days later, offering another piece of helpful content such as a blog entry or a video. Also include a link to schedule their visit to your location.
4. Send three days later, sharing testimonials and success stories designed to help the prospect begin to create a vision for how much better life could look once they purchase your products or services. Include a link to schedule their visit.
5. Send three days later, sharing a blog, infographic, article, or video that will be helpful to the prospect. And include a link to schedule their visit.

As a follow up, add the prospect to your main mailing list.

My guest believes that online advertising gave birth to one of history’s greatest frauds, and has become a threat to democracy. That’s right. It’s actually the subtitle of a 2022 book he wrote called AdScam.  

It is the basis for our talk, which looks critically and conscientiously at the unsavory side of digital marketing. 

He’s not some advertising outsider wagging his finger at the industry. Bob Hoffman has been the CEO of two independent agencies and led a major international agency’s US operations. He has written numerous books, including “Bad Men” and “Marketers Are From Mars, Consumers Are From New Jersey.” 

Nicknamed the “Ad Contrarian,” his writings under that name caused Business Insider to recognize it as one of the world’s leading blogs about marketing. He has been honored as the Ad Person of the Year by the San Francisco Advertising Club and served as part of the Advertising and Marketing International Network and the California Academy of Sciences. In short, he knows what he’s talking about when he says there is something  wrong with advertising. 

He and I both agree that there is a war between the privacy-side and the surveillance-side proponents here. And  it’s unclear how this dichotomy we’re in is going to be resolved. I will say that his solution for how to fix this – to eliminate all tracking – is harsher than mine. I’d like to end up with some arrangement where buyers receive advertising that gets close to feeling personalized, but that doesn’t track them without their consent.

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Bob’s original AdContrarian blog

Bob’s website

Bob’s LinkedIn profile with details on his company, Type A Group

Association of National Advertisers

Stephane Hamel

Oxford philosopher James Williams