Today we have a special guest, Samuel J. Woods from the website of the same name. He is a growth marketing consultant, that helps businesses develop a growth marketing engine that will increase leads and sales by 10X. Instead of wasting time chasing “growth hacks” that don’t work, Samuel wants businesses to understand the buyer better than anyone and to serve the buyer better than any competitor.

Years ago, Samuel jumped on the local marketing train and started an agency around it. He hit 500K ARR pretty quickly. He had a team of 5+ people, but it was a model that was hard to scale. He had already fell in love with marketing, and he started consulting. Now he also focuses on growth and having the systems in place to handle the growth of the marketing. Today we discuss how to align marketing, sales and growth.

Topics in today’s show:

  • When first starting out, it is a good idea to remove the barriers between sales and marketing.
  • Look at the process or customer life cycle timeline, and focus on your customer or client then you don’t have to worry about the distinction between marketing and sales.
  • Look at what happens when a prospect becomes a lead. Draw the line once you get to the discovery call. Then look at the function of each phase and what roles to hire for.
  • A customer success manager is a good idea to shore up retention.
  • Creating roles around individual customers can be a strategy
  • Apply tactics to different places in the business like revenue, marketing, retention, etc. A handful of great tactics is better than 100s, put the energy where you make money.
  • Growth Marketing Model

GrowthMarketingModelMindMap_ZTS

  • Attraction – first look
  • Acquisition – first visit to site
  • Activation – conversion – free trial, lead magnet, they have become activated
  • Revenue – convert to paid customer
  • Referral
  • Retention – ongoing process
  • Reactivation – paying users stop logging in, sign of churn, have process in place to reactivate
  • Your funnel is not a one time process – you need a lifetime understanding of your customer, and do different things depending on where they are.
  • This is all focuses on your customer and when they come to you
  • Growth drivers come from putting the customer front and center. What can I do to keep them engaged?
  • Changing perspective and putting customers first gets to those 20% to 50% conversion rates.
  • If you are a service company, know who your ideal customers are and will it work two years from now. Identify core needs and know who your best customers are, and meet them at least halfway.
  • Salesability follows through on the promises of inbound marketing by having a sales process. Inbound marketing gets traction, but there also has to be a sales component. There is a gap from reading a white paper or blog to becoming a paying customer.
  • Outbound and cold-calling still works. Just do it intelligently.
  • Your business and marketing is a system, you need a holistic view of what is going on.
  • A systematic understanding of your business will help you. With growth hacking, you need less than you think. Having a system, you can identify the constraints.
  • Marketing is a team sport, get plugged into a community and expose your ideas to the world and get feedback
  • Don’t get stuck in the online marketing ecochamber
  • Setting expectations is very crucial for setting up a marketing product in a box or any service. Offering a service needs to be done selectively.
  • If a business is struggling to get traction, it may not be viable business. Prequalify to make sure a business is viable before signing them up as a client.
  • When a client outgrows the done for you system, offering them a coaching product to train your replacement is an option. This could go on for months or you can offer monthly support. Then maybe a mastermind group beyond that.
  • A client can be extended forever, that is the power of a customer life cycle. The founder has to have the vision to serve the needs of the lifetime of the client.
  • Learn for models that will accommodate your growth and the kind of thinking that will get you to where you want to be.

Resources Mentioned:

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