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

0:28Hey there, thoughtful listener. million in revenue. Just head to upmyinfluence.com 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 upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. We'd love to have you.

0:58with us right now it's daryl amy daryl 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 daryl thank you so much for joining us oh man josh it's great to be here i'm so excited for our conversation today yeah absolutely also the author of the book revenue growth engine uh and uh 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.

1:41Those companies need to grow. And sometimes to grow, we need a little bit bigger an engine. 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 4Runner. 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. So there's a problem. Sequoia. We need a bigger engine. And I think a lot of businesses are like that as well.

2:21I 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.

2:58Yeah. Okay. So what is that? Yeah. Well, 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. And it's like any engine. I 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 lawn mowing? Well, here's my deal.

3:36I like that. I like to mow my lawn because there's 45 minutes on my 60-inch zero-turn lawnmower. when I listen to podcasts and can't take any phone calls, can just focus. So one day I'm mowing 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 lawnmower 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 lawnmower and do that. It's just gonna 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.

4:17And I think businesses like that, you go, well, we can get where we're going with 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?

4:56Yeah. 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 Michalowicz in The Pumpkin Plan, one of my favorite books. And what I mean by that is not all clients are able to buy everything that you offer, and not all clients are a good cultural fit with 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.

5:42The 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.

6:21If we use that car analogy, 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. 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.

6:56I 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? Yeah. So what might that look like in terms of like attraction?

7:33Is it just more paid ads or? 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 in their business to business. 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. Marketing says, hey, here's your leads. Then what does sales say every time? These leads are garbage. 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.

8:11If 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. 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 in those accounts? And so it's a very different mindset than 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.

9:01And sales has kind of been 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. But 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.

9:43You know, if we get a lead from somewhere else or a sales rep calls, I 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.

10:19Yeah. Do you see trends in, let's talk about kind of that very top of the funnel or, you know, those initial steps, you know, discovery, awareness, you know, that sort of stage. Do you see any trends taking place over the past three to five years that maybe leaders haven't been keeping up that they should be aware of? Well, there's been a continual trend that I call the filter. And 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.

11:04It's incredible. But the downside of that is the average human being is subjected to over 3 ,500 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 for those few messages that are specifically related to the personal and business outcomes that I want to achieve.

11:53Now here's the problem with most marketing and most selling is you look at most marketing and most sales scripts, it's just buzzword soup. We're as the leader in blah, blah, blah. We can help you be more productive, streamline your operations, maximize profit and blah, blah, blah. Right. It's just like static noise because in that, that filter immediately filters out that static noise. Yeah. It's irrelevant to me. It's 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, and the only thing that is going to catch my attention is something related to an outcome that is pressing to me right now.

12:45So 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 things we learned through the last three years, for sure, in the middle of the pivots and the dance and all the things that we experienced during the pandemic, was we learned that outcomes change. change. Before the pandemic, 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?

13:37You'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 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.

14:29So 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 buzzword soup, and focus on the current outcomes, this is the key.

15:21And in our shifting marketplace, 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. 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 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 answer the best way you can. But you know, just if someone says, what is this?

16:00What's the journey look like with you? Can you describe that in, in, in, in just a handful of minutes? Absolutely. And it's absolutely, everybody should be able to describe what they do in 30 seconds. 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 one or two are really in the way. 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.

16:41And together with our 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? Will you 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 revenuegrowthengine.com. And 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, maybe you need a bigger engine.

17:29And I would say there's a really good chance that you need to lift the hood on your business. And I'd be happy to help you figure out what it might take to upgrade your engine. 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 Audio Book, which, by the way, I love that you're giving away an audio book. I think that for other podcast guests that are happening 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.

18:05Well, let me share, Josh. This is, and for years I gave away the print edition, just pay shipping and handling. 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. I'm excited now. Yeah, so there you go, boom. And when you just share your information there, you'll see the link for the free book on the website or if you text revenue to 21 ,000 if you're out and about. But 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.

18:44And 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 audio book, 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 is one of the biggest compliments I've received on the book itself is it became a template. People have told me I can lay this template over my business and very quickly see where, oh, man, we're missing something here. And you know, if you've ever been in a car that's not firing at all cylinders, it's sputtering down the road.

19:23As soon as all those cylinders are in motion, 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. Yeah. Daryl, Amy, your website is revenuegrowthengine.com. 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, correct me if I'm wrong, it was$21 ,000. Just text the word revenue. Revenue to 21 ,000. Yes, sir. Good, good, good, good. Get your hands on the audio book.

20:03Spend some virtual time with Daryl. Build a relationship. Daryl's going to give you the 101, I'm sure, on all of this. And Daryl, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining us. Any other, I guess, to those who are running great SMBs, maybe they've been at the helm for five or more years. Um, 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, um, you know, that, that you should be paying attention to or activity that should be focused on over the next, you know, six to 12 months. Well, the world is always changing.

20:46And 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 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 sales in and we can survive this thing and then we'll start growing again. But the interesting thing is if you look back historically, some of the biggest success stories in American business happened during turbulent economic times.

21:19So 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 that are 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.

22:01We learned during 2020 that we can pivot our business. We can, we can turn on a dime if we need to. Well, we may need to turn on a dime a little bit more often than once every 100 years. This is a time where I 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, 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 10 years ago. Yeah. And I just wanted to mention this. So So the name of the podcast, because obviously our friend is listening right now, you're listening to a podcast.

22:41So all you have to do is just do a quick search, search for revenue growth podcast. 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. 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 things to the 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.

23:28Awesome. Love it. Darrell Amy, chief, one more time on the, it was the chief architect, revenue growth architect. Revenue growth architect. 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, Darrell, for joining us. Josh, appreciate it.

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