KEYWORDS: kpis, client, marketing, success, customers, leads, revenue, sales, prevail, funnel, marketer, profitable

Related Blog: How Do You Define Success?

SPEAKERS: Bill Arnold

Hello, and welcome to the great marketing experiment of 2023/2024 Hi, my name is Bill Arnold from prevail marketing at prevailmarketing.com. And I want to welcome you to the really the first installment of this, this adventure. I want to talk to you today about something else that's very, very important to me. I mean, critically important to me and I think it should be important to every single marketer, every single agency, period. And that's the discussion you'd have to have with your client or your or your boss if you're in-house. How do you define marketing success? Or as I like to say it how do you define marketing/sales success, because you can't have one without the other?

So I want to talk to you about what we've experienced because you might be surprised. You know, first off, I think this is something that every single marketer needs to have that discussion with, but at an agency level, you should be talking to your client that they also didn't engage at the outset of the engagement. Make sure you're aligned. You know, you make it through three, or four months, and they have one definition, what success looks like is something different. And that's a real problem. So get that upfront, understand that upfront.

Here's what my experience has been about 95% of all clients don't care if I am in-house or I'm working as an agency 95% of all clients have the wrong definition of marketing/sales success. Surprising. Yeah, I thought so to let me claim how that works. I don't know about 40% of clients, sit there and have absolutely no idea. You know, they were told her and agency, you know, we want success, please. We want to grow. But they haven't defined what that means. And so they're starting by you know, they're never going to be satisfied, because they don't know what they're trying to achieve. So you have a real problem at that point. You know, about 50%, a little more sophisticated, and they understand that there was a definition. They just had the wrong one. You know, they will say what we want, we want increases in sales. That's what we want. We want an increase in customers, right? How much what's successful as much as possible. That's not something you could obtain as much as possible. Where do you reach that success? You can never reach it? Because you never get as much as possible, because there's always more possible. So that's not a good definition. You're going to fail as an agency, you're going to fail as in house marketer, if that's the definition of your client or your boss, because they're never going to be satisfied. They're never going to come to you and say you've accomplished it. Great. Let's get to that next level. All right, so about 8% of clients have a definition, then they can qualify. They're gonna say something like, I want I 30% in leads they may be so sophisticated, they may study with some bottom-of-funnel leads over a period of time. Those are gonna say things like, I want to increase my social awareness. I need to get more eyes on me. I need to get more people paying attention to me on social media, which is success for me, I want to increase my brand awareness by 20% Whatever that means. They might say that, and those are all great key performance indicators. Those KPIs are things you positively have to achieve. No question about it. Those are a must if you're going to achieve marketing sales success, but I guarantee you if you go to the boardroom, of your client, or the boardroom of your boss, C suite, and you say, oh, gosh, I'm so excited. I got a 30% increase in leads over this last quarter. Isn't that great? They're gonna sit there and they're gonna look you cross-eyed and say, what does that mean revenue what does that mean in dollars? I can't spend leads. I can't increase your salary with leads. I can't buy new products with leads. I can't do anything with just leads. Same with social awareness. Same with same with with any KPI precursor KPIs. That's what those are. Those are precursor KPIs.

They usually have to be obtained in order to achieve marketing sales success, but no boss, no CEO, and no client is going to reward you for obtaining more leads even bottom-of-funnel leads, because they cannot eat them. They cannot spend them. So what is marketing sales success? Very simple. marketing/sales success is defined by us as substantial increases in customer revenue and profitability.

Let's break that down a little bit. Customers you had customers, it's gonna always mean more revenue, right? And you need more revenue and make money maybe you have something to spend so if you get that alone, you're gonna get a lot a lot of clients who are exceedingly happy Wow, thank you. I got you accomplished it but not quite. I've seen other agencies go out there and use pay-per-click or other paid demand generation programs. And you know, everything they they they may have got more more revenue, they may have got more customers. What they did they broke even at it. There was no profitability so what did you accomplish as an agency, what did you accomplish as a marketer, if all you did was break even at the end of the day, as far as revenue and customers, not much, so it has to be profitable.

You have to implement marketing sales programs that not only get results for customers or revenue but also are done in a profitable way. You know, and I'm not saying for any stretch of the imagination, do not try and track these KPIs, these precursor KPIs. Absolutely. That's not what I'm saying. prevail marketing probably goes to the extreme and does that perfect client. We tracked them off 400 Key Performance Indicators every single month. Is that a lot? Absolutely. That's a lot. We do that because we can tell when there's breakage in any of the systems, what needs to be enhanced, what's working, what isn't working. And only by tracking those KPIs will you know that so you have to set goals. And you have to track those KPIs.

You're not going to get more customers or more top of the funnel on the leads and the wholesaler library to middle funnel and bottom of funnel and opportunities. You're not going to get the customer so you have to track all those and make sure you reach goals that you've established, but never ever, ever substitute or decide you need to substitute. What marketing sales success is for those KPIs is never the case.

I challenge you to come up with a better definition of what marketing/sales success looks like. I'm interested in something missed. Because I'm very happy to be able to go to my client and say, look, let's establish what you think success is out of the gate. If I reach this number of customers, if I get to this number of revenue, and it starts at a profitable rate let's define what profitable wells, will you be happy? We establish those numbers upfront and I need to achieve all three.

Getting it over your customers and on the revenue doesn't solve it. If it's not profitability, it doesn't solve it so you can't get all three and if I get that and I go to clients, they're going to be happy. They're going to reengage with me. They're going to refer me they're gonna give me testimonials.

So at Prevail Marketing, we only will allow our customers to define marketing success. As substantial increases in customer revenue and profitability. like to hear from me if you think I'm wrong. So again, please provide your comments at the bottom of this. If you think I decided this product was right, please like please share. And I look forward to talking to you tomorrow. We're gonna go to the next stage of marketing/sales success to obtain it. It's easy to say this is what success looks like. But tomorrow we're going to start drilling down to how you obtain marketing sales success. So until then, have a good day. Talk to you soon.

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How to Achieve Marketing and Sales Success!

This is an unedited transcript of a video recorded on 11/2/2023 here is a link to the actual video