The team from Revenue Architects wishes you and your family a happy holiday season.

Our thoughts are with those less fortunate including the people of Syria, North Korea and the Philippines along with fellow Americans who need support.  We know how lucky we are and are thankful to have the ability to spend some time this holiday with loved ones and reflect on what we have accomplished with our clients in 2013.

Cobbler's Children

Thank you for helping to make this another great year for Revenue Architects.

We kicked off a range new client relationships, updated our branding and messaging, and continued our work delivering strategic revenue programs. We focus on integrated sales and marketing and building what we call a ‘revenue architecture‘ –  agile, iterative and integrated design and execution of revenue strategies, revenue systems and revenue programs. We work with industries that manage a considered or complex sale, including B2B, financial services including wealth management and insurance as well as complex B2C products.

We are very optimistic about 2014 and see continued growth in our wealth management practice, working with leading asset managers and their engagement with intermediaries. Our B2B practice is growing with a deeper focus on complex sales and marketing. We are also expanding our body of work in Marketing Automation and CRM consulting –  helping orchestrate the business change programs that are critical to capture customer value.

Of course, the intensity of our client work has taken some of our attention away from our own integrated marketing programs. So, one of  our new year’s resolutions is to expand our capacity and re-focus our own team marketing activities. We also will look for leading new marketing professionals to join our effort.

Our clients focusing on their own integrated marketing programs:

  • Defining new strategies to differentiate and capture customer value
  • Bringing together revenue technologies of CRM, Marketing Automation and Social Media into an integrated closed-loop system.
  • Executing more systematic and integrated marketing programs – tying together marketing and sales.

As we enter 2014, the team at Revenue Architects sends along our best wishes to you and your loved ones for health and happiness and as you enter 2014. We also hope your revenue architecture helps you fuel the growth you seek!

 

(Image Source: https://www.elytradesign.com/news-article/elytra-re-design )

 

Blueleaf Webinar

In a recent webinar hosted by our colleagues at Blueleaf, we shared a model for how advisors can build a balanced revenue architecture approach for inbound and outbound marketing.

For many advisors, about 70% of business has traditionally come through outbound marketing and referrals, but studies show that 89% today’s ‘buyers’ begin their evaluation with a web search and 70% of their decisions are made before they meet you face to face. Engaging this ‘new wealthy’ requires a strong digital presence and an inbound marketing capability, yet, many advisors are out of balance – either relying too much on the traditional outbound or on the new inbound marketing models.

In our view, the key is to develop and execute balanced approach driven by the metrics of your business. Financial advisor inbound marketing must be balanced with an effective outbound approach.

If you would like to learn more about the balanced approach to marketing or about the Digital Experience Index, contact us to begin the conversation.

There are an incredible number of CRM Apps out there. I have looked at several and wanted to mention Pipedrive as a great option for companies looking to focus on sales. It does a great job at pipeline management – with a nimble sales ready focus and good integrations using Zapier.

Companies like it because:

Pipedrive

1. The visual pipeline is powerful. The pipeline view is fantastic- visual drag and drop pipeline

2. Sales always needs an orchestrated next step. You can easily set that up and when an action is completed, it prompts you for the next step.

3. Managing contacts and companies is always a difficult challenge. the contact and company data management and synchronization is easy and tailored.

4. You need to track pipeline health and hygiene performance to meet goals. You can set up pipeline velocity metrics and track performance

5. Most CRMs are so cumbersome, they don’t get used. Pipedrive is built for the sales person.

6. If you are an Apps user, this is a no brainer. Pipedrive syncs with Google Apps.

7. Not expensive.

Read more

Revenue Architects DXI

Expanding Your Digital Review

Website assessments are nothing new, yet today we need to be taking a comprehensive view that includes a look at your websites, apps, media and social media presence. So, when you do your next check up, instead of thinking “website assessment”, you should be thinking “digital assessment”. Given how rapidly things are changing in digital strategy and systems, you should be conducting a self-assessment at least each year. When we do this for clients, we call it a “DXI” –  Digital Experience Index. The benefits are clear.

Begin with the free diagnostic tool.

Read more

Revenue Architecture

We are excited to be rolling out a new website today with updates to our messaging as well as a new visual system. The visual system communicates the vision and focus we share with our clients every day: how to build greater marketing and sales agility to respond to a rapidly changing technology, media and competitive environment.

In this post, I thought I would outline the framework broadly including, at a high level, the strategic capabilities that we think all businesses need to build in order to achieve this vision, compete with agility and drive sustainable revenue performance.

Read more

I received these statistics in a recent email and I thought they were worth sharing further with some comments. I am adding some implications as I see them below each one:

Eye-OpeningA whopping 68% of B2B organizations have not identified their funnel. (Source: MarketingSherpa)

  • Without a defined funnel, it is very difficult to develop a predictable forecasting capability.
  • Defining your funnel – with the buyer in mind – helps you develop the specific content you need to engage buyers at different stages.
  • In most of our B2B work we help define a collaborative qualification model between sales and marketing where sales teams have early insight into marketing leads. By taking a “decision support” approach, the organization is not leaving it up to marketing to determine the relative value of a lead – often the sales rep can help make the judgment supported by the behavioral data.

Read more