2400 - Driving B2B Success Through Sales Forecasting and Customer Understanding with Roadmap's Steve Whittington

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0:46Visit podverified.com if you'd like to be featured as a future guest. I'm Josh Elledge. Let's get into it. With us right now, Steve Whittington. Steve, you are the president of Roadmap Agency. You're found on the web at roadmapagency.com. Steve, it's great to have you. Fantastic to be here. I've been looking forward to this. Yeah. Before we get going, I always love talking with our guests, high-level leaders and the things that they do for fun when they're not at work. and I understand you are a climber. Tell me more about that. Yeah, I've been climbing now for over 30 years because I'm an old climber, but that's how I recharge and reset.

1:34I like to put myself out on the edge. So it was like a week and a half ago, I was with one of my climbing partners and we went and we climbed Mount Merchinson, which was 280 meters, so just shy of a thousand feet of vertical ice. It was a 10 and a half hour day, long day uh reminded me that i'm still alive and uh yeah i get back to civilization and i uh i'm ready to go again after being inspired being out in the mountains when when you say climbing are you like climbing with like the picks and the special shoes client kind of climbing or are you on your feet and you've got the ice tools that are specific for ice tools you're putting ice crews into the ice like i do i don't i don't solo except uh when absolutely have to uh so try to protect the climbs but yeah you're you're going up and you're finding nice features like we actually belayed out of an ice cave uh you know 200 feet up that was one of our belay spots and then you then you rappel down you know wow my mind is blown so i did uh you know i've hiked mountains before i did pike's peak uh about two years ago and i'm really looking forward to doing it again.

2:42But what you're describing is that's, that's, that's next level. Any, any tips for someone? Well, let me ask it this way. What do you get out of that experience? Like, what does it do for you? Like emotionally? Cause I know even just hiking Pikes Peak for me, you know, I've done endurance, you know, marathons and that sort of thing. And there's, there's just something you get, you know, when the body starts giving out a little bit, you know, your, you know, kind of your brain starts like, oh man, this is really hard. But somehow it's like you have to dig a little bit deeper to get to something that, that I found that you can really only get through some of these endurance type things.

3:31I don't know what, what's been your experience with this? well with alpinism which is really what i'm talking about here you're combining endurance with mental mental ability to manage risk and so you know you have to understand when you're hanging off a tool and you're trying to put in protection with an ice screw and your arm is getting pumped out that you have the ability to say listen i'm just going to switch arms i'm going to shake this one out a little bit and I practice hanging off tools. So I know exactly how many seconds I have left before I get protection in. So it's like, listen, I still got 45 seconds.

4:10Keep going, Steve. And, and then you just, you just really have to be able to manage your emotional state to push through all those different physical limitations and fear that you might be up against. So it really does like, for me, you're so connected nowadays. You've got so much stuff. You get up have Wi-Fi, none of that stuff, you're dialed in, you're focusing literally on inches in front of your face. So it reminds me how to focus. It reminds me that I can do hard things. And it makes when I get back to civilization, as I call it, makes the challenges every day a lot easier. Yeah. Well, Steve, let's talk about Roadmap, your website, roadmapagency.com.

4:52Who do you serve? what are your superpowers? Well, specifically who we serve are B2B professional service firms, other professional service firms like engineering accountants. We have a few of those, but mostly it's manufacturers, people that sell to accounts. And there is a band, a revenue band, five to about$75 million because that's the size of company, a medium-sized enterprise that we really specialize in. And the superpower that we have, so to speak, is the pain point that a lot of those organizations are in is they can't really predict what their revenue will be, say, in the next quarter or what their next sales cycle will be.

5:37So we come in and put in a system that creates predictability. And so the pain point that we solve for these folks is that they have fewer surprises. Like, hey, it's like, I'm not surprised anymore. I have a pretty good idea of what it's going to be next quarter, right? I have, you know, less frustration with my sales team because I know what it's going to be next, next quarter. And so it also part of that becomes how you get more efficient. So you have less waste, leaner team, that sort of stuff. But it really comes down to building confidence in your go-to-market system. And that's the outcome that we produce.

6:08All right. How does one get there? So let's say we're going to give maybe two, three solid tips for our audience, to our friend that's listening to us right now. And they're like, all right, Steve, I'm getting ready to take some notes. Tell me what I, before maybe we have a chat about potentially working together, you know, help me get an image of maybe some things that I could be doing a little bit better, you know, with our organization. So the first thing I see a lot of these orgs doing, and we have this backed by research, We have a go-to-market readiness index. So we've researched this. So we've got a big data set that what I'm saying is actually backed by research.

6:49So we've got statistical relevance that this is what's occurring in the marketplace. So a lot of folks have what I would say they start with their first challenge is they actually have what's called a hope cast as opposed to a forecast. So they hope they're going to grow 30%. They hope they're going to get there. And they don't have that backed by any kind of mathematical modeling of unit economics and stuff like that. So it's like, how are you going to grow 30 % over, let's just pretend you're 10 million bucks and you want to get to 13 million bucks. How are you going to grow that$3 million delta, right?

7:20Is that going to come from existing accounts? How many net new accounts that you have to add? That sort of stuff. They don't have that figured out with a mathematical model. That's the first issue. So if you do that first and actually mathematically model out and then you can have reasonableness based on what your growth goals are and you can see what it is that you need to do to get there. The second thing that you got to start with is, and this might seem counterintuitive, you should have started with this first, but then you do a deep dive into your customers. You really need to understand who your customers are and you tier your customers, like who are your strategic accounts?

7:56Who are your growth accounts? Who are your transactional accounts? Dial in on those growth and those strategic accounts, which are 80 % of your business. There's your ideal client profile. You don't need to do a bunch of research. You just need to look in your P &L and you'll see who your ideal client profile is. Get that understood. Get who the actual buyers are and then really understand what it is that you solve for them and dial in more on that. Then you can start to make the motions for how you go to market and how you actually bring that mathematical model, that gap delta, how you actually solve for it with various different motions of customer understanding.

8:30So that's the first things you do. First, actually create a real forecast with mathematical modeling of what you need to do with activities. Second, deeply understand your customers, who you have now, so that you can know who you serve best and understand what it is that you really do for them. And then when you understand your customers, you'll know how to reach them and you'll know how to actually have market message fit that will start to build the outcomes that you're looking for. Any tips on kind of getting to more realistic, accurate numbers instead of hopes and wishes and dreams? Yeah, I mean, the thing of it is, we have so much data at our disposal and we're not using some of these basics.

9:10So really it's pretty easy to take a three-year average of your accounts. And so you should have then a pretty good idea of what this is what my existing book of business. So again, using that$10 million analogy or example, let's pretend that's made out of 20 accounts. So you can say, well, geez, my average account is$500 ,000. Well, there's going to be variances in whether it's tier one, tier two, your tier one could be a million bucks and your tier two could be quarter million dollars. So then you know how many types of accounts you need to add if you want to get three million dollars. That could be three tier one accounts.

9:44So it's like, wow, I just have to land three tier one accounts to be able to get to what I want to get to. Now you got to back that up with some more math. How long does it take you to actually land an account? How long does it take to actually land and expand an account? So it could be that, you know, if you get an account, if your fiscal year runs calendar year, you get an account in June, we're only going to get half the revenue from that, right? So you don't just need three for the year, you might need six to get to your $3 million gap. So it is just math, and you have the historical numbers to back it up.

10:17And you've got to, you've got to think about like market conditions and stuff like that. But that is, that's where you start, you start with the numbers that you have, and you use that as a mathematical model to determine what it is that you need to go acquire. Is that part of the solution that you might provide to, again, just use data to get to an obvious answer? If the complaint or the pain point coming in could be something like, Steve, our conversion rate is just not what it was. Lead gen is just really sucking right now. Sales cycles are taking forever. People are just not spending money.

10:59Like, I'm sure you've heard it all, right? And again, no, no, those are three very distinct, different, you know, pain points or attributions of pain points. But where do you typically go when you hear complaints like that? So those are mostly symptoms of lack of customer understanding and lack of focus on a scorecard that has activities that you're trying to drive against. So if your sales cycles are taking too long, you probably don't have enough activity metrics as to how many times you reach out and how you reach out and what your market message fit is. Okay? And it's really apparent when you, again, start with your forecast, determine what it is that you need to target, and then what activities you need to do to get that to be figured out by deep customer understanding.

11:46Put it into scorecards. You have something to measure against. this is the savage truth is most times people aren't actually doing the activities they need to do in order to get the results that they want so they come up with our leads aren't converting we have too long of sales cycle or converting our close rate is too low all right have you have you reviewed game tape or what's your frequency of outreach how many touches are you doing i've heard lots of sales teams say well geez you know i've reached out to them two three times and nothing's happening. I'm like, well, you know, this company here, Boombright Media, another one that I own, it takes 12 touches to actually get the customer to the table.

12:24So you got nine more touches. Get out of there. It's that simple. But if you don't have that to measure against and the data model in place, it's just a conversation that you can't have. So that's why you have to start with understanding those fundamentals, get that in place. And then you can have those conversations about the symptoms. Steve, when you are working with a new client, what does that typically look like? And like, where do you start? And what does engagement actually look like? Do you work with people long term or generally just kind of working more short term to kind of set the ship in a different direction?

13:02Well, we I always I always want to work myself out of a job, to be honest. So I like to come in and help them set up their foundations and set up their systems to the point where they potentially don't need roadmap anymore. However, as the organizations we work with get successful, there's always additional stuff that they seem to be coming back to us for. Generally, the engagements are a little heavier up front and then they scale down as they internalize all the different activities and they no longer need us as much. and as they're getting success they they continue to have needs for our services update crms updates to websites you know they want to launch this campaign that they don't have the internal capacity to deal with that sort of stuff we continue to support them however how it starts i say start with research take our go-to-market readiness index see where you actually are at and where the gaps are in your go-to-market system and then it gets benchmarked against your peers.

14:01And then we have a roadmap, pun intended, about what we should be looking at. And then we know what the symptoms are, and then we can diagnose with the appropriate cures. Your website is roadmapagency.com. I see under resources, you got a lot of good stuff here. You might share a few things that you'd recommend to our friend that's listening. Yeah. So we have the Go-To-Market Readiness Index, which is where you can participate in a long form survey with my researcher that will determine what your go-to-market readiness is. And you get an actual score to show where you're at and then you're benchmarked against other folks that have been in the study for months and months and months.

14:43We've been running this for about nine months now. And that's where we're starting folks out now because we used to do like, you know, discovering assessment, but we thought, you know what, let's put it into an index so everybody has access to this. So you start there. If you're further along, you can download. And by By the way, none of this is gated because I don't want to do that. I want you just to have access to it. You can download the Revenue Factory Toolkit. That's where you can figure out your cost of growth, your cost of retention, your tiering of your accounts, and then the efficiency of various different motions that you're running, like say trade show is a play, inbound is a play.

15:21You can do that. All the instructions are in there for you, which is some fundamental work that you can do to really dial in for a forecast. However, you can work with us to actually true it up and we'll give you coaching on how to actually do that. So you get those fundamental numbers and ratios in place to really understand where your business is at. So those are two places to start. And you can start with that independently and to educate yourself. But we're also here to support you through the process. Steve Whittington, president at Roadmap, your website, roadmapagency.com. To our friend that's listening, go to the website, hover over resources, take a look at the Revenue Factory Toolkit, the Go-To-Market Readiness Index.

16:06I'm a huge fan of just like you said, ungate it, give it away. Get people using your stuff. I absolutely love it, Steve. Thank you so much. Great conversation. Steve Whittington, again, president of Roadmap Agency. Thanks for joining us. Thanks so much.

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