How does Predictable Revenue look like?

SEO Dashboard on Google Analytics.

This is a great question. In a previous entry to the blog I explained what is a Predictable Revenue Professional and the Revenue Management Flywheel, but so far I haven’t given any business case to exemplify how it looks.

Why would it be relevant to explain it with use cases? Because even though the goal might be achieving a certain level of Financial Target (a sales quota, an income or revenue goal, monthly recurring revenue attainment), the challenges of how to get there might be different and the muscles that an organization might want to use to get there may differ.

I do have one extensive business case that you would want to look into: Nimbo: how we grew and scaled a SaaS business from zero to hero. It’s a 6 blog post story that you could tap into to learn the lessons of growing a Software as a Service business.

Anyways, since 2016 I’ve been working on different projects as a freelancer to help SMEs and Start Ups reach a Financial Target. Back then I didn’t see it as clearly as I do now but in retrospect of how I got to do what I do I found that these projects helped me become a Predictable Revenue Profesional.

I would like to share with you some business cases that I have worked with clients in a format that the International Project Management Association uses to understand competencies and insights on projects. Let’s go!

Corporate Image Analysis & Media Plan for a Non-Profit Organization

This Non-Profit has the purpose of recognizing and making visible the trajectory, contributions and talent of women in university communities, opening a space to share achievements they make for society, politics and the economy.

On the occasion of International Women’s Day, which is commemorated on March 8, the Organization recognizes the leadership, talent and contributions of women in the university community, through an Award ceremony. This was going to be the fifth event and the founder of the Non-Profit wanted to have better reach and visibility than previous years, since it was very little known to the community. So we had two Objectives:

1. An evaluation of the corporate image of the association to deliver the right message to the right audience with the appropriate image;
2. Design & execute a persuasive campaign on social networks to maximize participation of contestants and visualization of the live event.

The success of this campaign would result in monetary and in-kind donations, new stakeholders in the community, and other schools investing on this Non-Profit.

For the evaluation of the corporate image what we did was to focus on defining the current brand values & personality, value proposal, & positioning. We did a ton of interviews with students & teachers, we also looked at what other Non-Profit organizations with a similar purpose were doing, and we then tested the new corporate image in focus groups.

We ended up creating a brand book that represented and connected with the community it was aiming to reach. After reaching our first big milestone, it was time to test our hypothesis with the persuasive campaign for the Award Ceremony Event.

Before the event we had 3 months to play with a media plan and campaign. We focused on Facebook, Instagram and Twitter as our main channels of content distribution. We faced an interesting test here: we could not use paid ads, there was no money for this — so it was all organic reach. The content had to really connect with the audience and the call to action had to be not only compelling but constantly exposed.

So we started defining the media plan. What’s going to be the frequency to publish the content for each platform? What type of content do we want to focus on?

Basic structure for content programming.

The first month was aimed at getting to know the Award, the initiative, why it matters and the meaning behind it. The second month was focused on generating new nominees for the Award, so the content was focused on the categories for the Award and examples of other women who were recognized for similar achievements throughout history. On the final month we focused on generating visibility and reach for the event.

We also had to do the design of motivations, copy for posts, hashtags, keywords, images and photos. We also did the design of the success metrics for Facebook, Twitter and Instagram:

Media Plan for the Non-Profit.

We also hosted a tweetathon for the brand of the Non-Profit, which helped us get a ton of exposure. The dynamic was for people in the community to nominate a women they knew who should be awarded in any category and explain the reason why. You can anticipate the type of participation this got.

For the day of the event we created content before hand, we live-streamed in several platforms and we distributed the event on Facebook, Instagram & Twitter. So here are some of the results:

Social media exposure was maximized with a weekly reach of 10,000 people, 50 shares of Facebook posts, and daily interaction with the public. The number of likes on the page increased with 1,800 new people. 150 followers for the Instagram account. 50 re-tweets, 100 new followers on Twitter, and 200 likes on the day of the event. And we managed to double the number of participants for the Awards. The best part is that the founder was really grateful for the results!

Acquisition & Conversion Consulting Service for a Tech Start Up

This one Start Up believes that everyone of us has something to teach, from something like learning how to become a gamer to becoming better at finance, and their objective is to create a platform where people can look for mentors from which they can learn new skills or advance their current ones through an online mentorship.

I’ve worked with this Start Up in different stages of their journey and I am a proud investor in this one.

On the first stage for this start up they were testing their product to find if they are product market fit. Their main objective was to attract new mentors and new learners to the platform so that they would convert to recurring users. So the main KPIs, from a product adoption perspective, would be:

1. # of New Visitors
2. # of new Sign Ups (of the new visitors, how many created a new account)
3. Monthly Active Users (how many mentors and new learners had at least 1 session in the current month)
4. Engaged users (how many mentors and new learners reached 5 sessions in the current month)
5. Churned Users (hoy many mentors and new learners detracted from the platform in the current month)

What was also important to measure was the acquisition channels from which they obtained the new sign ups & new visitors. Was it social networks? Which one specifically? Was it Paid ads from Search Engine Marketing (Google)? This would help them evaluate the quality of the users they were attaining and to evaluate which channel was the best to bring quality users:

Not the actual numbers but an example Scorecard of how it would look like the evaluation of these channels.

I would recommend using this scorecard (which is sales focused) with the product adoption KPI’s to have an holistic view of your channels and users. You want to measure Return on Ad Spent and Return on Investment. ROAS is the best metric to look at for determining whether your ads are effective at generating clicks, impressions, and revenue. However, unlike ROI, it won’t tell you whether your paid advertising effort is actually profitable for the company.

We evaluated this scorecard weekly and we were able to adjust the strategy and tactics, to implement experiments and iterate on new initiatives. This also allowed us to optimize and create a sales process:

• Workflows to activate users and reach the engagement goal
• Key Sales Activities that helped reach quota
• Lead generation channels
• Understanding Conversion Rates

The initial sales methodology framework that we used is what Ryan Deiss calls The Invisible Selling Machine. With the use of modern marketing automation tools (along with a handful of carefully crafted email messages) we could automate and perpetuate the entire sales process.

At this point they became autonomous, they proved they are product market fit. A year later they participated on INCmty, and generated traction with educational institutions — they went up market! At this stage for a Start Up, support and account management starts to become a challenge. Wrongly managed this can holster your growth.

The team reached out again because they needed help with the structure, optimization and KPI’s for customer success.

The first task we set out to do was mapping the user experience: from sign up and up to the first year as an active user on the platform. We asked ourselves, what is important and what is the context of the user on…

• …the first 7 days after sign up?
• …the first month?
• …3 months after sign up?
• …6 months after sign up?
• …the last month of the year?

We realized that we didn’t know how to answer these questions with the current information, so at each of this points in time we scheduled a Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction Score to start generating insights on what is working well and what is truly failing. If something is working well, then at the least continue doing it if not better. If something is failing, we should change it.

We also wanted to understand the chances of a user recommending the product to a family, friend or colleague. The 2 KPI’s gave us an eagles eye view of the milestones required for a user to become successful, and hence a chance for standardizing these milestones with other users. Therefore, increasing engaged users and resulting in more mentorships.

After doing this exercise it was easy to create a Scorecard that the Customer Success Team could use weekly to monitor the health metrics for the platform:

This is an example scorecard, it includes some of the metrics we used that were the most impactful to revenue.

It’s important to notice that before finding out about the milestones the team had close to 30 different metrics they measured daily…they were not noticing a rise in customer satisfaction, the team felt unmotivated because metrics didn’t reflect their effort and were getting worse and worse, and they could not tie any efforts to real results (revenue).

After reducing the clutter, this changed. As you’ll notice, they even got negative churn rate — which is a good indicator. The last step was to create a structure for the team to follow and to be aligned, we defined an SLA service targets so that agents could monitor the service level performance and meet the service level goals. We also made the SLA public for users.

The last stage that I worked with them was 5 months later. As they were gaining traction in the B2B market and the projects they were winning got more complicated and professional, they realized they lacked a sales process that matched their type of buyer and the structure of project management to deliver results for the educational institutions.

This time around we had more brainstorming and design sprint sessions to understand the current gap, collect ideas and analysis to sketch possible solutions, decide on the best courses of action to try, prototype and then validate with the Sales & Customer Success Team.

These methods can help align a team on the right problem to solve or provide actionable solutions. This image is from the webpage https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/

We came up with a structure for both teams to try over the next 3 months and measure results. The KPI’s for each were:

1. For Sales: Improve close ratio, accelerate time from Lead:WON, increased ARPA (average revenue per account).
2. For Customer Success: Not overpassing Deployment Budget, Satisfactory NPS for the users and the management team of the client, completion of the project deliverables.

LinkedIn Campaign & SEO to attract new investors

This is a Wealth Management & Growth SME that’s focused on Investment Advisors for individuals or families looking for a long-term investment and support in the most important financial decisions. At the time the Founder of this organization was looking to use LinkedIn as a prospecting & acquisition channel of potential investors.

This project was executed in three parts:

1. Market & Audience Research
2. Implementation of the LinkedIn Campaign
3. SEO Optimization

For the Market & Audience Research we leveraged the LinkedIn audience segmentation options. At first the founder had an idea of what audience he wanted to reach, so we used that for a first campaign focused on market research, mainly quantitative, to evaluate the audience on lifestyles, attitudes and opinions. What industry or role should content be geared toward? Should our posts appeal to beginners or advanced financial users? The LinkedIn audience analytics can answer these questions and guide the content creation process.

We leveraged LinkedIn Polls for Market Research. Based on the results we confirmed and narrowed down the audience we wanted to target for the campaign. Then we focused on the implementation of the LinkedIn Campaign. The starting point was to Establish Current Marketing Goals:

• Introducing the business to more potential customers
• Cultivating trust and credibility to win more customers
• Adding more leads to your sales pipeline
• Getting more people to sign up for webinars

Once we decided on the main goals, we pinpointed the type of content for the campaign. With LinkedIn ads, we promoted the best content to target our audience to driving conversions. We also tried using Webinars to drive conversions.

We reviewed LinkedIn Analytics and adjusted the content accordingly. Some of the most important metrics to monitor include:

• Followers, which reflects how quickly your company page is growing
• Impressions, which reveals how often your content appears in news feeds
• Engagement rate, which shows how often people interact with your content
• Click-through rate, which indicates how often people tap to view your links
• Cost per click, which shows how much you’re spending for each website visit
• Leads, which indicates how many times prospects submitted a lead gen form or completed a lead event
• Conversions, which reflects how many times prospects completed the conversion action you specified

The last effort we worked on was the SEO Optimization for the webpage. We basically focused on 4 key areas:

1. Research of our keywords. Since we were starting out, we looked for long-tail keywords that are not too competitive and are likely to convert.
2. Started a plan for writing good content. Useful and high quality content for your audience. The kind of content that people search for and want to read.
3. Build Backlinks. If you want your content to rank well on Google, you need backlinks.
4. We tracked the progress with Google Search Console. Adding GSC to the website helped us keep a close eye on which keywords we were getting impressions for.

Google Ads & SEO for awareness & consideration for a Healthcare Organization

This one was a new business looking to acquire new geriatric patients for a service that provided nurses and healthcare professional to your home as an alternative to a nursing home.

The founder of this SME first came to me looking for advice on how to optimize their website for SEO and how to kickstart a blogging strategy to find organic traffic. At the end of the conversation she evaluated if it was a good idea to start with SEM to attract visitors and convert the into paying customers. I offered my hep for both: an SEO strategy and a SEM campaign.

Our first approach to SEO was to understand what topics were important to her audience. What were the worries they had? What guides to a solution would they search online? What type of answers were they expecting? Were they looking for peace of mind or to take a decision? She had already done market research on her audience and had an idea on the topics. So I went to ubersuggest to find relevant long-tail keywords about the jobs to be done that her audience were looking to complete.

After this research, we sat down and analyzed the different searches that users were making online and we were able to group them by job-to-be-done categories, we then paired the ones related into a possible topic. We repeated this process until we had a 3 month plan for a weekly blog post with the relevant keywords alongside with the possible volume of searches. The blog was hosted on her site, so this would impact directly to the SEO score of her site.

We used SEM Rush to keep track of our SEO strategy, weekly.

The Site Audit enable us to keep track of the KPI’s you need for SEO.

At the same time we did a Search Campaign on Google Ads with the objective of generating awareness of the service. This would also help us test if her pre defined audience was really what she needed for the campaign to work.

Google Ads Awareness campaign results. We had limited budget and were using it as a test.

We already had the long tail keywords and other related searches we wanted to test, so we used that list. For the next 3 months we tested this SEO and SEM strategy successfully. We had a CTA on the website to start a conversation through WhatsApp and the founder started receiving lots of messages for the service. This was a good indicator, so we evaluated the option of increasing the budget available and start a campaign focused on lead generation for possible clients.

It was also time to step it up. For better results on this campaign I had to:

1. Register the business on Google My Business (having a big positive result on searches, site relevance and SEO);
2. Make a set-up on Google Analytics for the campaign and relevant metrics for the site;
3. Configuration of Google Tag Manager for the conversions, Google Ads follow up, Google Analytics registration, creation of events and other site tags for analytics & visitor insights.

Overview of the Lead Generation Campaign in Google Ads.

For the Campaign I created 1 Campaign, 5 Search Ads and all the extensions possible were active. Weekly we started measuring our KPI’s on a Scorecard:

Campaign Scorecard.

What I also did monitor weekly was:

• The effectiveness of the Ads (Impressions, CTR, conversions, conversion rate, total cost);
• Relevant keywords (CTR, conversions, total cost);
• Negative keywords (which ones drove traffic that we didn’t want or brought low quality leads?);
• Extension effectiveness (Impressions, clicks, CTR);
• Affinity categories (CTR, conversions);
• In-Market Segments (CTR, conversions);

This allowed us to make adjustments to the campaign according to the best result we wanted (which was maximize conversions). With each month that passed we added better CTA’s focused on starting a conversation at the moment they see the add or at the moment of the session of the visitor, either make a call or start a WhatsApp conversation:

By the end we had Call Ads, Responsive Search Ads, Responsive display ads. We started having much better results.

Perhaps the most important thing to keep in mind is that a weekly (even daily) follow up of the campaign metrics and KPI’s is what really makes the difference. The website changed a lot from the beginning of the campaign all the way to the end because of how we wanted to improve the visitor experience and what we learned was relevant for SEO and for conversions. Growth-driven Design. After six months, this was the result:

On the left: KPI’s of the campaign. On the right, performance metrics (yellow is calls made from ads & extensions).

Product Market Fit & Go to Market Readiness Design Sprint for a Tech SME

The last business case was for a SME that operates in Mexico & the United States as a Partner for Microsoft. They are IT consultants that are dedicated to migrating companies to the cloud, to integrating systems and applications in those organization, or help them to migrate from one cloud to another cloud.

Usually these businesses have IT infrastructure issues, are migrating or merging environments through acquisitions, do not have a dedicated IT department, or the existing department is overwhelmed.

They reach out to me because they were looking to expand business to Europe through the launch of a new service that’s gaining traction since the pandemic: Secure & Modern Work. For companies with 25 to 250 employees that typically have communication issues, low levels of collaboration, low employee engagement, uneven productivity levels, and low security compliance. They had the idea, the skills and the traction to start but basically we had to start fro scratch to create this new product, design the Go To Market Strategy and launch the product on a new market.

Modern Workplace different pathways.

Finding Product Market Fit. This was stage one. For this stage I treated the sessions as a Design Sprint, since I was working with the founders of the company their time was limited and we needed to be as effective as possible.

The challenge: Define the company’s value proposition for the European market. How might we create a Go to Market strategy to fulfill a new recurring revenue target (in euros) for a Modern Workplace? We had to answer several questions:

• Which business processes we want to Focus on?
• What are the “difficult” or challenging tasks customers are surprised we can do for them now?
• What are some custom developments, or projects, we’ve done for customers regarding Modern Workplace?
• What are the tools, apps, processes, or integrations we’ve built to streamline and accelerate deployments?
• What’s the biggest customer challenge that we’ve solved?
• What needs to happen for a company to make the decision to move to Remote Work? (growth, fear, risk, control)
• How would customers describe the problem? (functional, social, personal/emotional, value — when (situation) I want to (the motivation) so that I can (the outcome))
• What risks are customers afraid of (breach, data breaches, human error)?
• What barriers prevent clients from adapting to new technologies (technology limitations, lack of data, limited resources, shortage of qualified resources)?

The answer to these questions enabled us to define a matrix for the solution that covered the value proposition, target audience & buyer personas, the Customer/User Experience, Key Points of Differentiation, key pain points, Results to be achieved with the Solution & Main Solution Message/ Key Customer Benefits.

Competitive Analysis. Stage two was to define where to start and why. This one was pure research to validate our hypothesis that what we want to launch actually makes sense, there’s enough Total Addressable Market to enter, to understand how might we approach the market and which country was good to start.

Go to Market Plan Structure.

The structure of the plan follows a top-down flow, beginning with defining the market opportunity and the high-level company vision through to tactics with owners and execution timelines. In this way, the big picture vision is broken down into specific activities for functional groups and individuals to complete.

Market Opportunity matrix.

The market opportunity for new software or solution sales can be defined in terms of how many potential customers are present in the target market(s) and how many of those are likely to buy your solution.

On the left, Go to market modeling example (not actual numbers). On the right, the example measurements for the Go to Market strategy.

Measurement is an essential part of the GTM plan to maintain course and accountability. Formal reviews should be done on a monthly or quarterly basis. The purpose of this modeling tool is to determine which Go-To-Market model is optimal when expanding globally. This tool compares the estimated costs and returns expected when using the direct to customer and through other sales models. Compare the Net Income and ROI results to determine which model is likely to be more profitable in your situation.

Marketing & Sales Readiness. The last stage was to get ready for the Go To Market strategy. After selecting the country, defining the solution and the GTM, it was time to evaluate the readiness and to test our hypothesis before launch.

Digital marketing summary (in spanish). We created a document that dictated how to execute the Go To Market Strategy and a summary of the solution and audience.

We focused on getting ready on 4 Easy Go-To-Market Steps:

1. Go to market faster
2. Create and run campaigns
3. Nurture your leads
4. Acquire referrals

For the testing of the solution we looked on the current markets (Mexico & the US) for new clients we could make the offer to. Our hypothesis was that if the solution could build new opportunities, resonated with the company, and ended up on a sale, then it had the potential to actually deliver on the new market. We ended up closing 3 new clients with the Modern Workplace solution and after we launched on the new market.

That’s it for the biggest business cases that helped me build a Predictable Revenue Portfolio and that enabled me to understand this pain on SME’s and Start Ups. I hope that you learned a thing or two on how the revenue generation muscles can be used, that they can be modeled to be executed as projects, what metrics are important on measuring this initiatives, and that yo can count on me as a Predictable Revenue Professional to help you out!