Envision the best ways to access your particular market segments and ideal clients.
In the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™. we outline a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:
Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
Increase Velocity: Increase Conversion Rates
Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.
Strategy #3 – Go to Market
Tailor your go-to-market model to your firm and your advisors. A go-to-market model is based on your business model your target audience of personas and it helps you envision the best ways to access your ideal clients. Yet in addition to understadning how you might best access your particular target client segment, you should consider what is best for you and your firm. For example, what volumes do you need? How comfortable are you with outbound prospecting? To what degree are you comfortable using social media or digital marketing?
Enterprise funnel math exercises help align marketing and sales teams by zeroing in on critical funnel metrics like Sales and Marketing Qualified Inquiries (e.g. MQI) and Marketing and Sales Qualified Leads (MQL and SQL).
An enterprise funnel math model can help you identify the mix of tactics for for different funnel characteristics. For example, a sales-driven funnel might be designed with sales-led prospection activities and ABM tactics. A high volume lead gen funnel might be driven by Inbound Marketing or Paid SEM. Each funnel will have its own “DNA” and can be modeled top to bottom across deal stages to inform go-to-market strategies and budgeting.
Defining Your Funnels
A simple spreadsheet can help you produce a flexible working model that can be tailored to each company. To make it work, it is important to identify the right funnels or segments. The more granular your funnels are, the more accurate the funnel model will be – but too many funnels will add complexity. So, we typically identify 4-8 segments that represent distinct marketing and sales motions. Select segment that have a distinctive “funnel DNA” – not necessarily a P&L, or a geography segment. Often a funnel is centered around a product or service offering. Funnels can always be rolled up into geos, or P&Ls.
We develop Funnel Math Models with several tabs:
Rev Goals Tab
This tab helps model top down revenue goals and determine the required number of closed deals by funnel. We identify the number of accounts or deals required in each funnel to meet revenue objectives starting with top-down revenue goals, considering average deal size and deals per account. Elements in the model include:
Current Funnel Revenue
Current Number of Accounts
Average Deal Size
Growth Rate
Retention Rate
Target Revenue
Number of Deals Required
Number of Account Sales Required
Funnel Math Tab
This tab helps calculate the volumes we need up and down the funnel based on funnel conversion rates. First, define end-to-end pipeline stages and determine conversion rates. Stages to model may include the following (but your stages may have different names of course):
Touch to Lead (Conversion or Response)
Lead (MQI or SQI) to SQL
SQL to Align Stage
Align Stage to Propose Stage
Propose Stage to Close Stage
Close Rate in Close Stage
We recommend carefully considering the stages in your funnel. In particular, at the top-of-the funnel it is important to differentiate lead levels. For example, marketing inquiries (often called MQIs) are too often considered as “MQLs” or marketing qualified leads and sent to sales. However typically only a few MQIs will reach the MQL stage. Properly qualified MQLs should be accepted by sales (SAL) at about a 90%+ level and a significant percent of these will convert to SQL.
Funnel Allocation Tab
Next, we map go-to-market mix including lead gen sources or campaign archetypes for each funnel to determine the number of leads we expect to generate by program type or channel. We try to avoid marking them initially as “sales-generated” or “marketing-generated” leads as we believe that lead generation should be a collaborative process. However, we do get to roles and responsibilities soon! An example mix might be:
ABM
Email Outbound
Organic Search Traffic
Paid Search / Social
Outbound Sales Prospecting
Social Selling
Referrals & Partners
Social Media Marketing
Event / Trade Shows
Media PR
While maintaining a collaborative funnel perspective, now we can allocate primary responsibility of programs across marketing and sales. This is important in order to set business KPIs by team, but we should always look for collaboration and alignment in the full-funnel approach. For example, properly executed ABM may be a 50%-50% responsibility across marketing and sales – fostering true collaboration.
Funnel Budgets Tab
Now we can start to determine how to allocate budgets for our efforts by considering different options. This tab is a “scratch pad” to help consider budgets using both a top-down (percent of revenue) and bottom up analysis (e.g. CAC ratio).
Percentage of revenue considering growth ambition and business model (e.g. SaaS vs Prof Services/ Marketing-driven vs Sales-driven etc.) – typical metrics may be 7-10% of revenue
CAC – Cost of Acquisition – for each funnel segment (which may vary depending on the CLTV). We may want to invest more in acquisition for high CLTV, so the CAC helps model this.
Further bottom-up budgeting can be explored in the Marketing and Sales KPIs Tabs.
Marketing & Sales KPIs Tabs
In these tabs, we can model program-specific budgets to determine budget based on bottom-up marketing and sales programs. For example, email metrics and SEM metrics vary and costs can be modeled at a more granular level. The Sales tab is a further breakdown of sales-led metrics for lead generation programs, for example outbound sales prospection to model # calls and touches required.
Why Enterprise Funnel Math?
Funnel math is often used at an individual campaign or web conversion funnel level. Enterprise Funnel Math models work at a higher level to help align marketing and sales across product and service segments and point to more granular KPI metrics and budget allocations.
Contact us if you would like to see an example of an Enterprise Funnel Math model.
Buyers want an efficient, effective, quality buying experience. They don’t consider whether their experience is “marketing-generated” or “sales-generated”. They choose if they want to engage with your web content, 3rd party digital outposts or marketplaces or with your sales people. They most likely will interact with all of these in different sequences and in unstructured and unpredictable ways. Buyer engagement efforts take place all along the buyer journey and to deliver the experiences buyers expect and maximize your revenue impact, you need an integrated marketing and sales process.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/10/shutterstock_1084312901.png5001200John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2020-12-21 10:27:232021-03-20 15:04:51Integrated Marketing and Sales Process
As growth focused companies realize the critical synergies required across the marketing, sales and customer success functions, they are increasingly recruiting a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) to lead the way. Yet many CROs fail without a properly defined role and an adequate onboarding process. It is vital to ensure CRO success.
A Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) is responsible for a company’s revenue streams. He/she has the ultimate accountability for driving revenue growth. The role is clearly cross functional. The CRO oversees and aligns revenue-generating departments: Marketing, Sales and Customer Success. It is a challenging role. The average tenure of a Chief Revenue officer working at the same company is incredibly brief – only about 18 months, according to an annual survey from CSO Insights.
The first 90 days are critical – Whether a company makes money rests with the CRO. Expectations are that the CRO will have about one quarter or 90 days to prove they can meet management’s expectations. As Michael Watkins points out in his top selling book The First 90 Days.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/shutterstock_1311556100.png8331875John Stonehttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngJohn Stone2020-08-14 15:44:402020-10-26 12:55:47Chief Revenue Officer Success – The First 90 Days
This post is updated. The original post was published in 2017.
Personas represent the needs and behaviors of your ideal clients and are helpful in shaping your positioning and messaging.
We recently published the 2020 Edition of the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™. This resource is a comprehensive guide to help independent financial advisors build an ‘independent difference,’ that is, a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:
Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
Increase Velocity: Increase Conversion Rates
Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.
[Strategy 2 of 9] Valued Offering ~ Craft Market-Ready Service Offerings and Segment Messaging
You will be surprised how effective it is when you communicate offerings based on specific personas that represent the needs (or pain points) and behaviors of your best clients.
This post is updated. It was originally published in 2017.
Independent Advisors need a strategy-led, systematic growth program.
We recently published the Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™, 2020 Edition. This latest edition has been updated and outlines the Revenue Architecture Methodology that financial advisors can use to add greater structure and predictability in their revenue engine. We introduce nine steps and advisor-specific marketing and sales strategies that are helping advisors capture client value.
The comprehensive guide helps independent financial advisors build a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:
Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
Increase Velocity: Increase your Conversion Rate
Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.
Having a vision and game plan for growth is important for financial advisors to thrive in a challenging marketplace. The Smart Book™ outlines how you can achieve more predictable and sustainable revenue growth by establishing a Revenue Architecture that fits your firm. The key is to commit to a systematic sales and marketing process by following the 9 proven strategies to guide your approach.
[Strategy 1 of 9] Markets & Buyers – Define Ideal Clients and Market Segments
This may seem obvious, but we are surprised how many advisors we work with have not done a marketplace assessment, defined segments, and personas.
The CRO is Responsible for Predictable and Sustainable Revenue Growth
This post is updated. It was originally published in July 2016
Today, companies recognize the need for a company-wide revenue focus and a more integrated approach across marketing and sales. The CRO oversees the traditional responsibilities of the VP of Sales and the Chief Marketing Officer and is a member of the senior team overseeing go-to-market strategy and execution. The CRO is responsible for aligning company resources, defining differentiated go-to-market strategies and delivering on the company’s revenue performance goals.
An effective revenue architecture takes advantage of a range of leading marketing automation and sales enablement technology solutions. Cloud solutions make some traditional evaluation factors – like technology infrastructure management and application maintenance – less important in selection, yet functional and vendor considerations remain critical. It is easy to instantly provision cloud solutions and free trial offers often lead to snap decisions. However, a lot of operational disruptions occur from the selecting the wrong solution. Despite being easy to turn on and off from a technical and economic standpoint, the operational impact to a business from migration of data along with organizational disruptions is significant.
Build a technology platform to support your go-to-market strategy.
We recently published an enhanced edition of the 2020 Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™. This resource is a comprehensive guide to help independent financial advisors build an ‘independent difference,’ that is, a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:
Increase Volume: Generate More Visits & Inquiries
Increase Client Value: Get Better Qualified Inquiries
Increase Velocity: Increase Conversion Rates
Increase AUM and Revenue: Optimize Engagement for AUM growth and Revenue Impact.
More insights for the 85% of B2B marketers that don’t have effective personas!
Mapping out your buyers’ pain and organizing viaPain Maps™to enable the ULTIMATE Goal: InformingEngagement Personas™.
There are many different perspectives and philosophies on persona development. This makes sense, as they’re the most critical element of creating messaging and informing Message Maps™…then identifying and developing content aligned with the buy cycle…and ultimately validating the various components of a true buyer engagement strategy. In the end, persona development should be defined by how it’ll be used – in terms of purposeand context that will drive messaging, and ultimately content strategy. Other marketers will use it more as a “playbook” of all possible or available buyer insights. I’m not saying either is right or wrong, but it’s why we’ve created a new category called Engagement Personas™.
https://revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/05/Underwater-Explorer1.jpg400698Keith Sullivanhttps://www.revenuearchitects.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/RA_logo-300x137.pngKeith Sullivan2018-05-30 10:32:182020-12-22 18:06:20Solving The Persona and Product Marketing Paradox: Engagement Personas