1587 – Getting A Bigger Engine with Revenue Growth Engine’s Darrell Amy

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, thoughtful listener. Would you like consistent and predictable sales activity with no spam and no ads? I'll teach you step by step how to do this, particularly if you're an agency owner, consultant, coach or B2B service provider. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create more than $10 million in revenue. Just head to up my influence and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. You can even chat with me live and I'll see and reply to your messages. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for guests. Go to up my influence and click on podcast. We'd love to have you. With us right now. It's Darrell. Amy. Darrell, you are a revenue growth architect and you're the founder, CEO of Revenue Growth Engine found on the Web at revenue growth engine.com. Gerald, thank you so much for joining us. Oh, man. Josh it's great to be here. I'm so excited for our conversation today.

Josh (00:01:16) - Yeah, absolutely. Also the author of the book Revenue Growth Engine. And so give us an overview of what you do now as a revenue growth architect. Absolutely. I help entrepreneurs accelerate success so they can scale to exit The heart behind revenue growth engine is really simple. There are great companies out there creating great corporate cultures, giving back to the world. Those companies need to grow and sometimes to grow, we need a little bit bigger an engine we need. We need a larger engine. I remember early on, Josh, when I got my first boat, I was young, I was early in my sales career, got my first boat. I was pulling it to the lake with my I had a Toyota forerunner. Well, as sales grew and I got promoted inside the organization, I got a bigger boat, as we all do. That's the goal. And I tried to pull that bigger boat with that same truck. And I remember one day getting about halfway up a hill going, Uh oh, there's the Sequoia.

Josh (00:02:16) - We need a bigger engine. So and I think a lot of businesses are like that as well. I think we get to a point where we're growing and then we kind of flatline. And it's at that moment in the company when you have a decision to make, are we going to settle with this level of revenue or are we going to get a bigger engine and grow to the next level? And once again, if you are a generous entrepreneur that has a great culture, the world needs more of you. We need you to grow. And so the challenge in the book is to say, if you want to grow, take a look at your engine. Let's lift the hood on your business. And you may need a larger engine that's going to allow you to scale to the next level. Yeah, okay. So what is that? Yeah, well, your every business has a revenue growth engine. Whether you're a solopreneur or a global 100 company, you have a growth engine inside your business and it's the sum total of your sales and marketing efforts, how they're working together to drive the two core drivers of revenue.

Josh (00:03:19) - And, you know, it's like it's like any engine actually got the vision for this book. Josh While I was mowing my lawn one day. Now I know you go, wait a sec, you mow your lawn, Are you crazy? Haven't you been to every success seminar that says pay someone to do the the lawn mowing? Well, here's here's my deal. I like that. I like to mow my lawn because there's 45 minutes on my 60 inch zero turn lawn mower when I listen to podcast and can't take any phone calls, I can just focus. So one day I'm on my lawn and I'm looking at down the driveway and there's my car on the driveway and it hit me, you know, my lawn mower has an engine and my car has an engine. And if I wanted to drive from where I am right now over to Orlando, I could probably jump on my lawn mower and do that. It's just going to take a lot of time to get there. It's probably very dangerous and a lot of people will mock me openly along the way, or I can sit down behind the seat of my steering wheel in my car, enjoy air conditioning and et-cetera.

Josh (00:04:17) - And I think business is like that. You go, Well, we can get where we're going with our our engine right now. But the reality is if you want to accelerate, you need more horsepower. And so your engine is the sum total of the sales and marketing processes that are at work inside your business. And the reality is most businesses are like an engine that's not firing on all cylinders. There's things missing. And when those things get put in place, then you're in a position to accelerate. Okay, I appreciate the metaphor. And so when you're working with clients, what do you typically see as maybe some of those common missing elements or just underutilized? Yeah, well, I think the biggest thing there's two core key concepts you need to have a high performance engine. One is what you're focused on. Number two is what you measure. So what you're focused on really matters. Not all clients are created equal. To quote Mike McAuliffe's in the pumpkin plan, one of my favorite books. And what I mean by that is, you know, not all clients are able to buy everything that you offer.

Josh (00:05:23) - And not all clients are a good cultural fit with your your company. So I say unless you're Coca-Cola or Nike and have an unlimited marketing budget, you need to focus on your ideal client. And that ideal client is someone that needs everything that you offer or could offer and is a good fit for your business. The other reason you want those ideal clients is the principle of exponential revenue growth. These are the two core drivers of revenue. If you boil any business down to its core level, there's only two ways to drive revenue. Net new business, we get more. Customers or cross-sell. We sell more to our existing customer base. Now, the beautiful thing about ideal clients is they allow you to not only land but also expand, creating a cycle of revenue growth. Jim Collins would call it the flywheel. And so when it comes to growing your business, whatever engine you have, you need to make sure it's focused and pointed in the right direction. If we use that car analogy, let's let's orient everything in the right direction and that's towards ideal clients that can buy everything that you offer, that need, everything you offer, that can create that cycle of growth.

Josh (00:06:32) - And here's what's exciting, Josh Most businesses when it comes to revenue growth, they're either good at net new. They can go out and land new deals or they're really good at managing and taking care of their clients and good at cross-selling. When you get both of those going simultaneously, you get the proverbial hockey stick going. I know as this is releasing, we're just finishing the Stanley Cup season. I like hockey. I'm a Canadian that married a southern girl. The hockey stick where I really like hockey is in revenue growth and so you get net new and cross-sell going at the same time and you create exponential growth and that's where things get really exciting. So make sure you're identifying your ideal client and make sure you're looking at both those drivers of revenue and then the cylinders that you need in your engine. The sales and marketing processes start to make more sense when you say, What can we do to get more ideal clients and cross-sell more to them?

Darrell (00:07:28) - Yeah. So what might that look like in terms of like attraction? Is it just more paid ads or.

Josh (00:07:36) - Well, it depends on your ideal client. And here's here's what's perfect about this, especially for my friends in B2B. I'm speaking to my my peers, their business to business. You know, in business to business, you've got sales and marketing and sales is always looking at marketing and saying you need to send us more leads. So marketing says, Hey, here's your leads. And then what does sales say every time these leads are garbage, you know, it goes back and forth. What I would say is this if you're in B2B and you know who your ideal clients are, you also should be able to figure out very quickly who your ideal prospects are. If you know who your ideal prospects are, the companies that you want to do business and the core decision makers in those companies, you don't need leads. You already know who your leads are. What you need is engagement with those ideal prospects. So with that in mind, we end the madness of sales and marketing always at each other's throats and instead say, okay, here is our list.

Josh (00:08:36) - Here's our ecosystem of ideal prospects. What can we do from a sales standpoint and from a marketing standpoint to cooperate, to engage with the decision makers and influencers and those accounts? And so it's a very different mindset. And a lot of times I think marketing has had the mindset of, well, let's put some lures out there and wait for a fish to swim by and nibble on it. And sales is kind of in the same way. Let's just throw hay in the haystack till we find the needle. Instead, we're going to make a commitment as a company to go, okay, these are our ideal prospects. These are our future clients. These are the people we want to do business with. So let's figure out a cadence of marketing, outbound marketing. Let's figure out a cadence of outbound selling to engage with these people so we can bring them through the process. So there's all kinds of tactics that can work inside that. Of course, paid ads to that audience is just one tactic. The idea is to be able to say from a strategic standpoint, we're going to look at this from the mindset of these are the companies we want to work with.

Josh (00:09:43) - You know, if we get a lead from somewhere else or a sales rep calls, always say to the sales team, you can call on whomever you want to call on. But these companies, they absolutely these ideal prospects, they will absolutely hear from us on a regular basis. I don't want to call on them. No worries. We'll give that account to somebody else. But these are the companies that we're going to commit to call on. And this is a mindset shift in terms of, you know, hoping somebody swims by to saying we're going to go proactively figure out and engage with the goal of 100% engagement with those prospects.

Darrell (00:10:19) - Yeah. Do you see trends in talk about the kind of that very top of the funnel or you know, those initial steps, you know, discovery awareness that, you know, that sort of stage? Do you see any trends taking place over the past 3 to 5 years that maybe leaders haven't been keeping up that they should be aware of?

Josh (00:10:42) - Well, there's been a continual trend that I call the filter.

Josh (00:10:46) - And this the filter gets more and more elaborate or more, the filter gets finer and finer. So we have a filter right now with the incredible. Means of communication that we have. We can communicate in so many different ways in our society right now. It's incredible. But the downside of that is the average human being is subjected to over 3500 messages a day. So it feels like I get that many emails, but you take that and put billboards, banner ads, TV commercials, try to watch a YouTube video, right? I mean, just all day long we're being bombarded with messages. And if we were to process every one of those messages, we would be certifiably insane. So what we've done is we have put up elaborate filters. Now, I would say to you that 99.9% of the messages that come to me in any given day do not get through the filter except except for those few messages that are specifically related to the personal and business outcomes that I want to achieve. Now, here's the problem with most marketing and most selling is you look at most marketing and most sales scripts.

Josh (00:12:00) - It's just buzzword soup where as the leader in blah blah blah, we can help you be more productive, streamline your operations, maximize profit and and blah, blah, blah. Right? It's just like static noise because in that that filter immediately filters out that static noise.

Darrell (00:12:21) - Yeah, it's irrelevant to me.

Josh (00:12:23) - Totally irrelevant. So look, I love John Farrar. John Farrar is the CEO of Nimble and I quote him all the time. When I talk to John, he goes, My email inbox is a slaughterhouse, which is so true because in the three minutes I have to check email. I'm just totally thing that is going to catch my attention is something related to an outcome that is pressing to me right now. So here's why ideal clients are so powerful. If I know who my ideal client is, I can talk to my ideal client and figure out what outcomes are relevant to them right now. Now, one of the thing we learned through the last three years for sure, in the middle of the pivots and the dance and all the things that that we experienced during the pandemic was we learned that outcomes change, you know, before the pandemic.

Josh (00:13:14) - If you're a tech company, you were selling scalability, you were selling the ability to explode your business. Now, imagine if in the months following the pandemic when we were all huddled behind our screens and zoom rooms, if you had received a message from one of those technology companies saying in this era of explosive growth, now is the time to scale, you would have said what you're So now that outcome was relevant in 2019, it ceased to be relevant. These companies were selling the same products and services, but the outcomes had shifted. Now it was redundancy, resiliency, remote office, all of those things, same product, different outcome. And here we are now as this is being recorded in mid 2023 with economic uncertainty and interest rates and and different things like that which have specific effects on the clients, your ideal client. So what we need to do is we need to understand what's going on in their world right now. And this is a continual process of listening and asking questions to make sure that the messages we send out from a marketing and sales standpoint are hyper relevant.

Josh (00:14:29) - So I recommend in the book Revenue Growth Engine, which anyone can get their hands on. Just text the word revenue to 21,000 and we'll get you an audio copy of the book immediately. I recommend that just as companies have an inventory of the products that they sell, what their salespeople and marketing people need is an inventory of the outcomes they can deliver. I call this an outcomes inventory because buyers don't buy products and services, they buy the outcomes your products and services deliver. If you want to get through the filter, talk about outcomes. And this is the secret sauce. This is the extra mile that if a sales team and a marketing team will work together to figure out what's going on right now, get rid of the marketing acronyms, all the buzzwords soup and focus on the current outcomes. This is the key. And in our shifting marketplace, you know, the good and bad news is the outcomes are going to continue to shift. If you have your ear to the ground, you can establish massive competitive advantage.

Darrell (00:15:33) - Yeah. Daryl, how are you working with clients? So let's say that someone reaches out, they engage. Can you take me through that typical process from, you know, maybe just like what Discovery looks like? And then let's say they make a decision. Daryl, I want to engage with you. What are you doing initially and then tactically? I mean, this is a lot I'm asking so you can ask. It's the best way you can, but just. If someone says, What is this? What's the journey look like with you? Can you describe that in in in just a handful of minutes?

Josh (00:16:06) - Absolutely. And it's absolutely everybody should be able to describe what they do in 30s. So let me give it a stab. It's very simple. Step one, we help clients understand the barriers to growth, because if you have barriers in the way, how are you going to grow? So in a 20 minute meeting, we'll look at the six common barriers to revenue growth and we'll help identify which 1 or 2 are really in the way.

Josh (00:16:30) - Second, at a revenue growth workshop. And I just had an opportunity to help a great technology company who wants to get from 5 million to 10 million in the next three years. We got off site and together with their leadership team, we put together a revenue growth engine strategy. So what are all the components of that engine that need to be in place? So we help them design their engine. And then at that point, a lot of clients say, will you help us? We help guide us along this journey of continuing to put more cylinders in our revenue growth engine. So remove the barriers to growth, design your engine and accelerate. And if anyone wants to get started on that, you can text the word revenue to 21,000 or go to revenue growth engine. And that's the that's the name of the game. Once again, Josh, if I want to break through to the next level, if I'm stuck in a plateau of flat revenue growth in my organization, you maybe you need a bigger engine.

Josh (00:17:29) - And I would say there's a really good chance that you need to lift the hood on your business. And and I'd be happy to help you figure out what it might take to upgrade your engine.

Darrell (00:17:40) - Yeah. So there's a book, an audio book that you've mentioned here. Can you tell me a little bit more about that? It's revenue growth engine audiobook, which by the way, I love that you're giving away an audiobook. I think that for other podcast guests that are happened to be listening, that's a whole lot more compelling than, well, we have a contact form or we got ourselves a newsletter box. You can subscribe. Well, good luck.

Josh (00:18:05) - Well, let me share. Josh, this is and for years I gave away the print edition. Just pay, shipping and handling. Yeah, but what I noticed about that was most people that are thinking about growing their company don't want to wait a week for a book to arrive in the mail. They want instant access to ideas.

Darrell (00:18:23) - I'm excited now.

Darrell (00:18:24) - Yeah.

Josh (00:18:24) - So there you go. Boom. And when you when you just share your information there, you'll see the link for the free ebook on on the website or if you text revenue to 21,000 if you're out and about. But when you when you get the book, I want you to instantly dive in. And in the very first chapter of the book we give a full overview of the revenue growth engine. And for those of you who are like, Well, how am I going to see a picture of this engine if you're not, When you listen to the audiobook, we also include some helpful documents that you can print out as little reference have on your desk so you can start to benchmark your business. Like where are we doing well? And that that is one of the biggest compliments I've received on the book itself is this was it became a template. We let people have told me, I can lay this template over my business and very quickly see where, oh man, we're missing something here.

Josh (00:19:17) - And you know, if you've ever been in a car that's not firing on all cylinders, you know, it's sputtering down the road. As soon as all those cylinders are in motion, you can you can accelerate. And that's what I want to see businesses do, especially great businesses that are purpose driven. I want to see them accelerate and grow so they can have more impact.

Darrell (00:19:37) - Yeah. Daryl, Amy, your website is revenue growth engine. Now, if you go to that website, there's a button right there where you can listen to revenue growth engine audiobook, or you can schedule a 20 minute revenue breakthrough. And then sound would correct me if I'm wrong, it was 21,000. Just text the word revenue revenue to get that right.

Josh (00:19:59) - 1000? Yes, sir.

Darrell (00:20:00) - Good, good, good, good. Get your get your hands on the audio book spend. Spend some virtual time with Daryl. Build a relationship. Daryl is going to give you the 101. I'm sure, on all of this.

Darrell (00:20:12) - And Joe, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Any other, I guess, to to those who are running great SMBs, You know, they maybe they've been at the helm for five or more years either, you know, any observations about where we are today or things that you ought to pay attention to right now that you would advise, you know, that you should be paying attention to or activity that should be focused on over the next 6 to 12 months?

Josh (00:20:44) - Well, the world is always changing. And so, you know, it depends what industry you're in or what what part of the world you're in. But there there are some shifts in the economy right now. And and I don't think you know, I think there's a tendency of small business owners when storm clouds start to blow in that we want to kind of put our heads in the sand and go, okay, well, let's just trim costs, let's pull the sails in and we can survive this thing and then we'll start growing again.

Josh (00:21:09) - But the interesting thing is, if you look back historically, some of the biggest success stories in American business absolutely happened during turbulent economic times. So whether or not you want to use the R-word and whatever you think about that, the reality is I think it's super important right now that we have an honest look at what's going on in the marketplace, what's going on in the world, what's going on with your clients. Talk to them and then go, how do we need to adjust our strategy to take advantage of this? Because every season is an opportunity. But the things that worked in the season of Easy Business and even the things that worked during the season of the pandemic are not the things they're going to work right now. So this is a time to get strategic and think about your business, have your ears to the ground and make this, you know, make this a habit. We learned during 2020 that we can pivot our business. We can we can turn on a dime if we need to.

Josh (00:22:07) - Well, we may need to turn on a dime a little bit more often than once every hundred years like this. This is a time where would say, don't put your head in the sand. I would say what we say at the end of every revenue growth podcast episode, you know, we say, let's get going and let's get growing. This growth is still possible right now. It's just probably going to be a little bit different than you may have thought than what worked a year ago or ten years ago.

Darrell (00:22:34) - Yeah. And I just want to mention so the name of the podcast, because obviously our friend is listening right now. You're listening to a podcast, so all you have to do is just do a quick search search for revenue growth Forecast Growth podcast.

Josh (00:22:47) - That's it. Simple. Yeah. So revenue Growth podcast and we love just sharing ideas on their revenue growth is when it comes to the strategies around developing your business, growing revenue, whether it's net new or cross-sell. This is something that we're always going to school on.

Josh (00:23:06) - It's why I love this. What I do so much is there's always things changing, there's always new ideas and there's always new ways to apply these these things to the given given circumstances. So our goal at Revenue Growth podcast is simply to bring fresh ideas on a regular basis that are going to help you think about your business in new ways and help you grow.

Darrell (00:23:28) - Awesome. Love it. Daryl. Amy Chief, one more time on the it was the chief architect. Revenue growth.

Josh (00:23:37) - Our revenue growth. Yes.

Darrell (00:23:38) - There we go. I like I love the term so and again founder CEO of revenue growth engine your website one more time is revenue growth engine.com. Thank you so much for joining us.

Josh (00:23:50) - Josh appreciate it.

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