Episode 375: Mastering B2B Growth: Unified Revenue Strategies

Intro

0:00:18 – (Bob Woods): Welcome to the Making Sales Social podcast featuring the top voices in sales, marketing, and business. Join Brynne Tillman, and me, Bob Woods, as we each bring you the best tips and strategies our guests teach their clients so you can leverage them for your own virtual and social selling. This episode of the Making Sales Social podcast is brought to you by Social Sales Link, the company that helps you start more trust-based conversations without being salesy through the power of LinkedIn and AI. Start your journey for free by joining our resource library. Welcome to the show.

00:00:51:25 – (Brynne Tillman): Welcome back to Making Sales Social. I’m very excited to have Mark Osborne today. He is the author of Are Your Leads Killing Your Business and a celebrated MarTech Trailblazer and the voice behind the B2B Growth Blueprint Podcast. Recognized as a top 25 marketing and technology trailblazer by Ad Age magazine. Mark has shaped the interface between technology and marketing, with his innovative approach to B2B, SAS, tech, and professional services, a visionary in developing revenue systems and go-to-market strategies.

00:01:32:22 – (Brynne Tillman): Mark brings a wealth of knowledge from his roles at top firms like Kantar and NewStar, as well as his advisory positions in multiple high growth enterprises. Mark, welcome to the show. 

00:01:44:34 – (Mark Osborne): Thanks so much for having me. I’m really excited to be here. 

00:01:48:01 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh my gosh, I’m thrilled and I cannot wait to dive into your genius. But before we do, we ask all of our guests one question, which is what does making sales social mean to you?

00:02:00:28 – (Mark Osborne): Sure. So it’s a well-known adage that people do business with other people that they know, like, and trust. And to put a little spin on that, it’s not who you know and it’s not what you know. It’s who knows what you know.

00:02:15:03 -(Mark Osborne): I really believe that. And so that’s one of the things that I really think about, sort of making sales social is building those networks in those relationships, but adding value to those relationships through the process.

00:02:27:00 – (Mark Osborne): So then when people need what you have, they know how to come to you and ask for it, and you have the credibility and trust to have that conversation. 

00:02:35:43 – (Brynne Tillman): And that’s perfect. And I could not agree more. That value is what earns you the right to have those conversations. So that’s brilliant. So I’m just going to dive right in.

00:02:48:17 – (Brynne Tillman): So you’ve been recognized as a trailblazer in using data and technology for marketing. Can you share a little bit about how you started in this really tight mission? What sparked your interest in Martin? 

00:03:02:43 – (Mark Osborne): Yeah, absolutely. So it’s sort of a funny story for your listeners that are old like me. They remember that in the early days of the Internet, people didn’t have access to it all the time.

00:03:13:22 – (Mark Osborne): You would go on and it was like a billboard at the local grocery store where someone would put a sign and then you’d tear off the phone number and then call them later. That’s the way these BBS Usenet groups that were billboard services

00:03:25:29 – (Mark Osborne): would operate. And cause people had access to the Internet, like once a week, so they would go there and their username was their email address and then they would post stuff and then you’d get back in touch with them because there’s no such thing as spam.

00:03:37:08 – (Mark Osborne): They wanted you to know how to email them. So in the nineties I was in college, I was playing in bands and managing bands and I noticed that people were going on to these Usenet groups and they were trading bootleg concert tapes of I have Dave Matthews in Birmingham, Alabama. So I know you live somewhere near Birmingham and I know you like Dave Matthews.

00:03:57:03 – (Mark Osborne): So when one of my bands that sounded like Dave MATTHEWS went to Birmingham, I emailed all these people, which led to me selling out concerts for a little unknown artist, which led to a job at a record label, led to a job in sales and advertising sales at a radio station and sort of went from there. And in fact, I left radio, went back to digital and worked and founded some digital agencies because I was really enamored with, you know, how data and technology work together to make this sort of personalization at scale.

00:04:27:06 – (Mark Osborne): And there’s really a whole generation of marketers that their whole career has been finding the next, you know, sort of arbitrage player, the next little hack like the first people to optimize their website for search engine optimization so they get found in search engines how to land, you know, landslide of customers come in and a real windfall and then the first ones to buy paid search ads again you know, they had a real, a flood of clients come in and there’s really a whole generation of marketers that have chased sort of one little tactic after another.

00:05:01:12 – (Mark Osborne): But today that’s really not possible. And what I realized over the course of my journey is the companies that are consistently growing, you know, doubling every year, as, you know, sort of high growth companies are really trying to do aren’t the ones that are chasing these growth markets. It’s the ones that are building systems that they can then layer in data, technology, and other tools to run faster, better, 24 hours without human error, all of those different things.

00:05:28:16 – (Mark Osborne): And that’s really what leads to success. And that’s what my book is about. It’s about how modern businesses have adapted to the changes since COVID to build these systems for attracting more of the right prospects, accelerating their best deals through the sales pipeline and activating their existing clients for faster renewals, larger upsells and more referrals. 

00:05:47:85 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. I want to go in that direction, rather than my predetermined questions, because it’s just the title Are Your Leads Killing Your Business has me going, tell me more about this. So I want you to dive in a little bit to the methodology, the thinking behind that. When also what’s going on between marketing and sales that’s broken, and some ideas on how to fix that.

00:06:18:11 – (Mark Osborne): Yeah, absolutely. So the premise is, you know, we all know that 80% of our revenues come from just 20% of our customers. That’s typical for most businesses. And so if you even close to 50% of your leads, which would be a pretty high percentage of, you know, everyone that you sort of identify as a lead versus what you close, then that means that 80% of your revenues come from just 10% of your leads.

00:06:43:14 – (Mark Osborne): That other 90% of leads is a distraction and has the potential to kill your business. And I call it there are three different types of killer clients, we’ll use a little bit of, you know, a horror classic horror story. There’s the customizer that’s like Jigsaw, the guy who just wants everything customized exactly to them. They don’t believe in your product vision or what you want to sort of build for the marketplace.

00:07:08:01 – (Mark Osborne): They want you to build something just for them. Unfortunately, that pulls you behind what your competitors are building, because your competitors are building what the market once, not what this one client wants. The next type of killer client is the classic slasher. So like, you know Jason from Friday the 13th, he wants the price slash. So he cuts out all of the margin that gives you the money you need to invest in your business to grow.

00:07:30:25 – (Mark Osborne): And so you’re not making any money off of that client. And they can kill your business, too, because if the client actually believed in the value they were delivering and would pay what the product or solution is worth, then you could reinvest in making it better, keeping up with your competition. And then the third type of killer client might actually be sort of a double threat because it’s like Freddy Krueger.

00:07:51:16 – (Mark Osborne): It’s the churn and burn, and these are the clients that churn out before, you know, ever giving you testimonials or referrals. And they burn out your team because, you know, it’s just someone else leaving out the back door. And you can never keep up with, you know, bringing in new clients if you’re always losing them out the back door.

00:08:08:26 – (Mark Osborne): And oftentimes it’s the same people that originally wanted you to customize the solution because they didn’t believe in your product and originally wanted to price slash because they didn’t believe in the value that wind up churning out before, you know, ever creating any value in your business. So those three types of clients can really kill you. And so what you need to do as a business is to build systems to quickly identify those best opportunities in the marketplace so that you can put all of your resources on them.

00:08:35:26 – (Mark Osborne): And really win those ones that perfectly align with your ideal customer profile. And they really have the potential to be one of those Tier one clients that represent 80% of your revenues, because if you are in identifying them and putting all of your resources on them, your competitors are, and you’re going to lose more often than not, companies are sort of spreading out all of their resources like peanut butter on every lead.

00:08:59:27 – (Mark Osborne): Everyone gets sort of equal amount of attention, and that’s how you really wind up losing those best opportunities in the marketplace. So, as you said, it really requires great integration between marketing, sales, and even customer success. And that’s why we talk in the book and we really espouse having a unified revenue team that has a shared scorecard of KPIs that represent things that you care about from marketing, things that you care about, from sales, things that you care about, from customer success.

00:09:29:23 – (Mark Osborne): But they’re all incentivized for growing the company revenues because that’s really the goal of the revenue team. It’s not generating inquiries that never turn into sales. Is marketing qualified leads that are sort of worthless to the sales team, or the sales team selling things that the customer success team can’t renew, or upsell, or grow because they made, you know, impossible promises.

00:09:51:25 – (Mark Osborne): And likewise, the customer success or account management team has lots of insight about what your customers really love that they can share back to that marketing team and back to that sales team to accelerate those deals through the pipeline. So we’re really creating that unified approach, is what we’ve seen be the key to success, and those systems that link all of those different subsystems together.

00:10:13:10 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that. Typically, those roles are very siloed. That’s right. And they’re not communicating. So can you talk about a situation where you did unify siloed departments, right? And how you got that kind of working as one versus. 

00:10:34:65 – (Mark Osborne): Yeah, absolutely. So I was working with a sort of early stage company and they were really struggling to find their position in the market, at sort of where there was white space that they could potentially exploit or where they had a really unique value proposition.

00:10:50:03 – (Mark Osborne): And the marketing person before me had, you know, really sort of struggled because they kind of just said, well, who do we want to be? But instead they should have looked at, well, who are we? And so I looped in the customer success team to say, what is it that’s unique about our customers that stay with us, that love us, that grow with us, that is different from others and what we found was for this particular solution, they had a lot of success with ad agencies, whereas all of their competition was going directly after the marketing leaders at brands themselves or at companies, whereas this company had sort of carved out a little niche working specifically with ad agencies.

00:11:28:24 – (Mark Osborne): So I took that insight from the customer success team, used that to shape all of our marketing positioning and then all of our sales enablement material. So it was a consistent storyline all the way through. And then we did a specific campaign where we identified the top 100 agencies that matched the profile that were working with us so far, and we did a specific mailing campaign to them and then followed up with a phone call and an email to get those sales appointments and actually, you know, got the company to double their revenues within about six months through that analysis of understanding where is our success.

00:12:07:03 – (Mark Osborne): So what does that mean for an open space in the market and a unique positioning strategy? And then how do we activate that within the sales team? 

00:12:14:90 – (Brynne Tillman): Oh, I love that. So I’m going to go one deeper, this man. I’ve gone in a completely different direction, but I’m so excited. So, you know, when you’re talking about it sounds like almost an account-based marketing strategy, like a go-to-market strategy.

00:12:30:28 – (Brynne Tillman): How do you determine? So now you’ve determined, okay, these are the folks that we want to go after. This is our messaging, this is our unique proposition. How do you determine the actual companies, and I’ll share afterwards, kind of something that we do in account-based marketing. Yeah. What are some of the things that you do for your clients or for whomever you’re working with, even in determining what are those 100 companies, what does.

00:12:59:91 – (Mark Osborne): Yes. So it starts with that analysis of what’s the 20% of customers that make up 80% of the revenue. And we like to go beyond sort of firmographics of, well, they work in this industry or they’re this size or they have this many offices or whatever it might be, that use or even techno graphics like, well, we work really well with companies that have Salesforce installed or we work really well with companies that don’t have Salesforce.

00:13:21:10 – (Mark Osborne): They use a difference here or whatever it might be. Those are, you know, sort of descriptive and valuable. But what’s really valuable is when you get into the context, well, it’s the context that they were operating in that triggered the need that sent them to the market to look for a solution like yours. And, you know, most companies, their solutions can, you know, create value in lots of different ways.

00:13:45:24 – (Mark Osborne): But that value is perceived differently based on the context that the companies operating in. So if a company’s growing and they need a solution like yours, they’re going to get different sort of value propositions from it. Then, if they’re shrinking or working within a shrinking marketplace, where they’re trying to find more efficiency. So recognizing that company context, because that then also gives you triggers to look for in the marketplace, you can find companies that are in a shrinking industry if that’s where you excel, or you can find companies that have recently gotten funding, if that’s where you wind up working out better and then getting really deep into the buyer personas of, you know, the actual decision maker buyer as well as the champion and maybe technical influencers that are involved with this buying committee and then understanding what are they like. Because oftentimes there are patterns within industries, these types of companies tend to hire these types of people that have these types of approaches to solving problems. So then you can really craft messaging that resonates with those people specifically and really get beyond, you know, sort of generic messaging in the marketplace and instead speak to the real personal pain points and things that they care about, both professionally and personally that are going to attract them to magnetically to your solution.

00:15:05:04 – (Brynne Tillman): Fascinating. So I’m going to share something that we do once you’ve got all that. So we will match those two LinkedIn filters as best as we can, and then we will click on if we have Sales Navigator across the company Team Link who has. So maybe you have 10,000 companies that meet your criteria. Now let’s look at who has relationships.

00:15:30:23 – (Brynne Tillman): So your 10,000 might grow to 300 and then. Right. So anyway, that’s something that we do once you’ve got that great ICP and we really focus primarily on LinkedIn filters. But mean, just a couple of other things that, you know, you said let’s go beyond the tech that they have, like name one or two or three things that you’re looking at that’s beyond the obvious.

00:15:56:02 – (Mark Osborne): Yeah. So funding events are a big trigger in the marketplace and we actually see that different solutions that we’ve worked with. Some do better when people are at seed stage or, you know, sort of Series A or approaching series A, others do better once they’re a much larger enterprise. And so by, you know, using that as a way of, you know, really digging in on, you know, where are the right folks for us at the right time.

00:16:23:20 – (Mark Osborne): Often the other thing is hiring for certain roles. That’s often a signal that the company is starting to invest in a certain area where your solution is going to do better once they start to grow their accounting team or their operations team or their sales team and by recognizing that we’re a solution for companies that are growing in this space and then looking for that signal of they’ve now posted a, you know, a job description or a job posting for this, now’s a good time for us to go talk to them.

00:16:53:06 – (Mark Osborne): Likewise, when people change roles, that can be something so like a new hire within, you know, a certain leadership position that you know, that you know, for example, you know, a really rigorous marketing technology infrastructure solution where a new CMO oftentimes will use that as sort of their thumbprint on a company of, well, I brought in this new, you know, sort of technology infrastructure.

00:17:18:29 – (Mark Osborne): And so that is a signal that it’s a good time to call on that company. Those are a few that we have often used. 

00:17:24:65 – (Brynne Tillman): I love that. Have you ever explored using Crunchbase for funding companies? 

00:17:30:05 – (Mark Osborne): Yeah, we have. The challenge is, you know, sort of getting access to the data. You got to set up a scraper or crawl or something to you know, sort of make that data usable at scale so that you can use it.

00:17:43:06 – (Mark Osborne): But certainly within sort of smaller, you know, really high value tickets, we just have a pretty small set of, you know, those best Tier one customers that you’re going after. All of those different resources are great. 

00:17:57:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Awesome. I love that. I’m going to jump over to your podcast because I love the idea of a blueprint for B2B growth. So from your experience, what is one of the overlooked elements of creating sustainable growth in companies?

00:18:15:05 – (Mark Osborne): Yeah, so it’s really funny. We see this pattern all the time where someone will work in an industry for 5 to 10 years and they have an idea for a better mousetrap. So they found a company to sort of create that mousetrap and bring it to the market, and they know what’s right about it. So they just built it and they know what’s wrong with the competition because they used to work there and they’ve got a big enough rolodex of people to call to get some customers and get to sort of a certain revenue size.

00:18:41:17 – (Mark Osborne): But then they hit a ceiling. And so frequently when they hit that ceiling, they’re like, okay, I’m going to hire a head of sales and make that person be just like me, and then we’ll double our revenues. But that doesn’t really work. And then they’re like, Well, I’m going to go hire an ad agency and they’re going to say, you know, spend a bunch of money, but they’re kind of saying the wrong things and to the wrong people because what they haven’t done is they haven’t taken the time to think through the strategy of who they need to target, what they need to say that’s really differentiated from their competition and then how they need

to deliver that to grow, both expansion as well as sort of retention revenues and to really build those systems. And so that’s that sort of inflection point where we see that the bringing in a blueprint to really create focus on is it attracting more of the right prospects, is it accelerating your best deals through the pipeline? Is it activating existing clients?

00:19:39:23 – (Mark Osborne): Where’s that fastest path to growth? Because, you know, when you don’t have focus, it’s really hard to know. And so we have built a diagnostic that we use to help companies sort of recognize where’s the fastest path to growth within those three areas? What are the KPIs, and sort of met metrics and measurables that we can use to sort of bring the team together to focus on how do we improve these?

00:20:02:11 – (Mark Osborne): Because once we improve these, everything else will follow. 

00:20:06:54 – (Brynne Tillman): So I love that and I love having a framework specifically so that you’ve got this consistent process to put people through that tailors it, but you’ve got this framework, proven framework right, that that’s worked on your podcast. You talk a lot about Blueprint and ultimately how to roll them.

00:20:28:24 – (Brynne Tillman): So we’re pretending that we’re on your podcast. Okay. And I’m going to sit. What is one like if you said you’re talking with a CEO of a funded around a series, a funding company, and they say to you, Mark, what is the one piece of advice, yeah, that you’d give me to really amplify my message and get myself on the right path for that B2B group.

00:21:04:23 – (Mark Osborne): So the one thing that I tell people is build a revenue scorecard, look at metrics across marketing, sales, customer success, have everyone that impacts those metrics, have a regular meeting, pulse, a cadence where they can come together, look at how are we pacing against those metrics, against benchmarks, either industry benchmarks or your own, and then create hypotheses on how to improve those and then execute against that for 90 days, try to make improvements, do a you know, a debrief on what went right, what went wrong, do it again.

00:21:36:23 – (Brynne Tillman): Start, stop and continue. 

00:21:38:78 – (Mark Osborne): That’s right. And so, but the first thing is bringing everyone together on a shared revenue scorecard. That’s the most important thing. Then the next thing is really sort of creating that teamwork, creating that focus on the right KPIs within that marketing, sales, customer success, you know, sort of acquisition, retention and expansion revenue, and sort of really looking at metrics across sort of the volume, are you getting the right volume at each stage, the quality, because the quality then impacts the speed with which they go and then the conversion rate at which they go through each stage of that.

00:22:15:23 – (Mark Osborne): But the sort of those four areas, volume quality, conversion and speed, but both conversion and speed are a function of quality and creating metrics at each stage of that sort of buyers journey from, you know, becoming aware of the problem that they have to deciding to use you to then deciding to advocate for you in the marketplace and actually be a raving fan, understanding the KPIs at each of those stages and bringing a team together to work on it.

00:22:44:01 – (Mark Osborne): That’s the key. 

00:22:46:45 – (Brynne Tillman): Absolutely. Just phenomenal advice today, really. I had quite a few moments, really loved this. 

00:22:54:47 – (Mark Osborne): Well, thank you. You’re very kind. 

00:22:57:61 – (Brynne Tillman): While I could go on forever and ever, because I do have like so many questions, I am going to round this out. So, Mark, what was the one question I should have asked you that I didn’t?

00:23:09:03 – (Mark Osborne): Well, so for anyone that’s been listening and thinks this is sort of interesting or might be valuable for that, I’ll happily give a copy of my book to them. All they have to do is go to modern revenue strategies dot com slash free download

00:23:24:08 – (Mark Osborne): I’ll give them not only the whole book but also all the sort of templates and calculators for creating these systems within their business so they can get started on it today.

00:23:33:03 – (Brynne Tillman): So share that website again.

00:23:36:75 – (Mark Osborne): it’s modern revenue strategies dot com slash free download. 

00:23:41:90 – (Brynne Tillman): That’s a magic gift, if there’s a listener that is not going to download that those resources now you’re not so I’m going to have you repeat it one more time because lots of folks are in their car listening or walking, listening to this podcast.

00:23:59:16 – (Brynne Tillman): So tell them one more time. 

00:24:02:66 – (Mark Osborne): Sure, it’s Modern Revenue strategies. That’s the name of the company dot com slash free download and then get the full book as well as all of the templates and calculators that I referenced in the book. 

00:24:14:03 – (Brynne Tillman): Love that. And you know, is there any other way that people can get a hold of you? 

00:24:20:90 – (Mark Osborne): Yeah, absolutely. I’m always, you know, active on LinkedIn. Or you can email me, Mark at Modern revenue strategies dot com. 

00:24:26:41 – (Brynne Tillman): Wonderful. I thank you so much. I know that what you’ve taught our audience today is going to have a huge impact on some folks. So I think that that’s always our goal, right, that we can have that bring that value and have that impact.

00:24:42:19 – (Brynne Tillman): So as we close out to all of our listeners, when you’re out and about, don’t forget to make your sales social.

Outro:

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