How To Get Off The Revenue Plateau

MARC GUBERTI

What’s up Breakthrough Success listeners, Mark Bird, the podcast and virtual summit launch coach here. And if you are a business owner, one of the things that you’re thinking about is revenue. How can I make more revenue for my business?

MARC GUBERTI

And there comes a point for a lot of business owners where they hit a revenue plateau, where it feels like no matter what they try and what they do, they keep hitting the same income, the same revenue.

MARC GUBERTI

So we’ll be talking about how do we get on top of the revenue plateau and keep on accelerating in this episode of Breakthrough Success. Our guest who joins us is the founder of Strategic Point Marketing and Advertising Agency, which he founded in 2009.

MARC GUBERTI

He started the company to give business owners an option to work without a long -term contract. And he’s a fractional CMO who is also the author of the book, How Some SEO Companies Disguise Laziness and Hide Poor Strategies.

MARC GUBERTI

Our guest who joins us for this episode is none other than Josh Ramsey. Josh, welcome to the show.

Josh Ramsey

Thanks for having me. How are you doing today?

MARC GUBERTI

Josh, it is such a pleasure to have you on Breakthrough Success and this revenue plateau is such an important topic because so many people can relate to it. They can relate to feeling like they’ve been hitting the same thing for like a few weeks, a few months, even a few years for some businesses.

MARC GUBERTI

So I think part of overcoming the plateau is first the mindset ones. So I’m wondering if you could share with us how we can not feel discouraged if we see a revenue plateau and just be open to the possibility that, hey, we can exceed this thing.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, man. That’s a great question. It’s a loaded question. There’s a lot of different angles to evaluate when you go down that path that you’re talking about. You know, the first one that comes to mind is a client that I worked with back in, I think it was 2011.

Josh Ramsey

And they had grown the company tremendously up till about two, well, 2011, but they had it for 20, I think it was 28 years when I came on board and they had been doing the same thing and it had been working and they figured, okay, we can move to multiple markets and grow and do the same thing.

Josh Ramsey

But they didn’t adjust well enough. And that put them on that plateau where they couldn’t quite get off of it. There’s a lot of different forensics I could go through, but yeah, I mean going back to the mindset is just the first thing is even being aware that you’re there, right?

Josh Ramsey

Like what, there’s an old saying that they talk about what got you here, won’t get you there. Have you heard that before? Yeah. Yeah. So that’s kind of where it all starts off is you don’t even realize that you’re stuck.

Josh Ramsey

And when you don’t realize that you’re stuck, then you haven’t figured out how to overcome that. And I equate it a lot of times to reading an awesome book and you read the book, a business book, and you think, man, I knew that.

Josh Ramsey

I knew that that was there, but I never could put it into words. And now all of a sudden you have that aha moment and you’re aware and now you’re stuck trying to figure out. So you have two different versions of people.

Josh Ramsey

You have the people that don’t even realize they’re there. And then you have people that are there and they’re thinking, I need to work with somebody. I need to work with an ad agency or a consultant or a business coach.

Josh Ramsey

And they’re not sure how to trust that person. And is that person really going to take you to that next love?

MARC GUBERTI

And I think it is important for us to acknowledge that we are that revenue plateau if we are there because You don’t want to lie to yourself and say like you’re accelerating when you know the numbers say plateau So you definitely want to be honest with yourself even if it may not be a pretty picture and just admit to where you are so you know where you are and where you can Build up from in the next direction you need to take for some people that next direction could be the advertising agency such as the one that josh has So i’m wondering I feel like part of that and even in my experience i’ve hired coaches and I do coach people How do we get better at hiring types of people who can help us break out of our revenue plateau?

Josh Ramsey

You know, I actually taught a video on that not that long ago. And I think the biggest frustration that business owners face is that you hire a coach or an employee and they’re great actors. Yet when it comes time to put off employee and actually put on the real face, they don’t do it.

Josh Ramsey

And that’s extremely frustrating because every business owner knows how expensive, expensive it is to hire somebody. And then if they can’t produce, then you’re just stuck in thus putting you back on that same plateau.

Josh Ramsey

So sharpening interview skills can help. There’s different tools out there, assessments, but a lot of times on the agency side, what I tell people is a program that I created back in 2010. I was frustrated leaving a conference and explaining to business owners that I was solid.

Josh Ramsey

Like I knew what I was doing. I had great experience and they should be working with me. But yet I had a hard time communicating clearly enough that these business owners would say, you know what, I’m going to work with you.

Josh Ramsey

So when you reverse that to the business owner’s side, they’re looking at me thinking, I need a guy like Josh, like Mark, but how do I really trust that they can do the job? So I created a program that I called “test before you invest.”

Josh Ramsey

And the thought process behind this program is to allow your company to work with an agency or an individual before you sign a long -term contract, any contract, whether it be a six month, 12 month or more, the thought process is can you actually work with them long enough to see what their results are going to be?

Josh Ramsey

How do they implement things? How do they write a marketing plan? Now, what I looked at was, I want some skin in the game. I want the business owner to put some skin in the game. So I’m not just working for free, but I personally put, and I’m only going to speak to my experience, so take it with the grain of salt of this is me, but I put skin in the game, pay me a little bit.

Josh Ramsey

I’m going to do a lot of work. I’m going to show you the value of what I do, how I work. Then you can make the assessment of do I fit or not? Because over the years as I’ve been able to grow multiple businesses, one of the things that I’ve been able to be lucky enough to do is work with business owners that I really like, business owners that are going to give me the return of appreciation and sacrifice on their side of growing and adapting on their scale, because again, you know, when you look at the plateau that we’re talking about of growth, it’s not just generating leads.

Josh Ramsey

If you don’t have the backend components done, then those leads are just going to fall by the wayside, if you will, give me a second to tell one more story. Just worked with a business owner for the last 12 months and I won’t give too many details because I just don’t do that.

Josh Ramsey

But this business owner came to me and in December of 2018, they asked me to guarantee them that they were going to get leads from the work that I did for them and I told them, I said, I can’t guarantee anything, but I feel really strong about what we’re going to do and how.

Josh Ramsey

So while I don’t want to guarantee it, something good is going to happen. So we go through the entire year and at the end of the year they came back to me and they said, Josh, we just are not sure that we got too much from it.

Josh Ramsey

I said, well, how many leads did you get? And they said four and I looked at them and I was blown away. What do you mean four? Like, how do you get four? Well, we had been tracking it on the backend.

Josh Ramsey

So I turned around to the CEO and I said, you actually had 32. He goes, no, no, no, no. I had four. I said, I ‘ll tell you what, I’m going to send you all 32. Well, it turns out his salesman never told him that he got 32.

Josh Ramsey

His salesman said, we got four because those four were the only ones that the salesman qualified. The others, he sent a text message to, he sent one email to, they never responded. He never tracked him down.

Josh Ramsey

Thus, poof…gone and you can’t go back and get him.

MARC GUBERTI

I mean follow -up is so important when it comes to success in any area and that just goes to show like you could like there was a potential for 28 extra clients there. It’s just that the follow -up didn’t happen.

MARC GUBERTI

I feel like some of the reasons that people are stuck on their revenue plateaus are not able to get clients and you’re mentioning all these examples of all different people you’ve helped. I’m wondering if you can share with us what works best for you for finding these clients.

MARC GUBERTI

Are you going to events? Are you like doing social media activity? What currently works best for you?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, so it’s a great question. So the first thing we look at is the marketplace. What does the market want? And we often build personas. The persona is going to be who do we target and you’re going to typically build multiple personas.

Josh Ramsey

So when you identify who it is that you’re reaching, you can identify if they pay attention to social media and buying decisions based on social media, or do they pay attention to inbound marketing such as AdWords, excuse me, not AdWords, they pay attention, well, they would pay attention to AdWords, but they do searches online through Google or Yahoo, some search engine of that nature.

Josh Ramsey

So when you build those personas, then it allows you to make a decision. Now within that, there’s a couple of things to pay attention to. The first one is your cost per lead and cost per sale. So your cost per lead is how much do you have to spend to make your phone ring?

Josh Ramsey

Now, if that phone ringing is quote unquote, the online generation, they send you an email, they send you a text message. That’s what I call make the phone ring because now they’ve reached out to you and they’ve raised their hand and they said, hey, I have a question for you.

Josh Ramsey

I would like more information. So what do we pay for that? Now here’s the sticky point that I think a lot of business owners in my experience don’t pay attention to. They hear that they need to spend money to generate a lead, but they live on repeat and referral.

Josh Ramsey

Well, the first mistake that they make is that they don’t calculate the cost per lead of repeat and referral. Now they think, and you’re probably thinking to yourself, well, hang on, if it’s a repeat referral, I haven’t had to spend any money.

Josh Ramsey

But if you really assess that thought, you did spend money to get that. Cause let’s say you went to a B and I group and you spent $25 and you got one or two or 500 referrals. Well, you spent your time and energy and you spent money to go to that group, even if it was gas money.

Josh Ramsey

So fully loaded into that marketing budget of going to a networking group, you’ve spent money. So understanding that you spend money on every single lead is the first part. The second part of that is understanding that not all lead generation is gonna be equal.

Josh Ramsey

So I equate it to buckets and you fill each of them up halfway with water and water would equate to money. You come back in 30, 60 and 90 days and you identify in each bucket if it’s increased, decreased or stayed the same.

Josh Ramsey

So one bucket could be social media. Let’s say that you run ads on LinkedIn. Another one is Facebook and you determine that Facebook could be a good avenue. Then you run some SEO or pay per click. Those would be two different buckets.

Josh Ramsey

Another one, let’s say, is radio. So you evaluate each of these buckets, which are tactical strategies in marketing. Once you’ve done that, then you can assess, how much did I pay per lead? How much did I pay per sale?

Josh Ramsey

And when you know how much you paid per lead and per sale, it allows you to clearly assess where you should invest more money. So that kind of answers part one of your question, yeah? Yeah.

MARC GUBERTI

I mean, being able to like, know the avatar of the client. I mean, that’s a really great point because a lot of people come, you know, like some people say social media works for them. Other people say like, you know, go to networking events, but it is about knowing who your client is and knowing where their attention is, and meeting them at that point of their attention.

MARC GUBERTI

So knowing that avatar as Josh meant his persona is a really key part. And I mean, it’s just one of those things like knowing the person you’re supposed to have as a customer is important for breaking out of that revenue plateau.

MARC GUBERTI

Another thing about the revenue plateau though is that a key thing Josh mentioned earlier was that idea of adjusting. Like if your business cannot adjust, you’re not gonna get out of the plateau. If you are able to adjust, you get out of the plateau.

MARC GUBERTI

So with that in mind, what separates the businesses that are able to adjust from the ones that are not able to adjust?

Josh Ramsey

Yeah, that’s again a shit in the thought process of being able to adjust in the marketplace. I call it, being agile. I kind of go back to my “test before you invest” theory. Radio people are notorious for, and I’m not knocking radio, I’m just using it as an example, but they’re notorious for saying that you have to invest into three months or six months or 12 months to really get your return.

Josh Ramsey

And I look at that and I say, I see their point. It’s valid to a degree, but I also look at the business and ask the business owner, is this going to sink your ship? And if the answer is it’s going to sink your ship, then don’t do it.

Josh Ramsey

And now that sounds somewhat simple. However, it’s not that simple because as a business owner, we sometimes panic. And when panic sets in, we make the worst decisions. So understanding what could sink your ship and dipping your toe in the water is the best strategy.

Josh Ramsey

And you have to almost look into the crystal ball and look to the future. So speaking of crystal ball, I’m going to take you down a path real quick. I created a mathematical program. It’s almost, I guess I would equate it closely to an algorithm, but it’s based on logic and I call it my crystal ball marketing program.

Josh Ramsey

So they always say, you can’t have a crystal ball. You can never know what the future is. And I always like to buck the horse and say, that’s not true. You can. So what I’ve done is I created a program that allows you to plug in logic and understand either based on actual numbers that you have or projected numbers that you believe will happen.

Josh Ramsey

And it gives you a mathematical breakdown to understand how many leads need to be generated to generate a certain amount of phone calls, to generate a certain amount of qualified leads, and then down to sales, down to what your cost per sale was, your total return, and how many leads you would have to get.

Josh Ramsey

So at the end of the day, at the end of the mathematical equation, you’re able to plug in a couple of factors. I think it’s about six factors. And when you plug in these six factors based on different parts of information that you received from the marketplace, you’re able to take all that information, put it into one spreadsheet and output very quickly.

Josh Ramsey

Is this a good choice or not? And by knowing that choice, that takes away all of the mysterious factors. I just did that with a garage door company out of Austin, Texas. And when I ran the mathematical equation, while he was raring to go on radio, I told him, I said, Hey, I just don’t think it’s a good idea.

Josh Ramsey

While he didn’t really want to listen to me, I didn’t want him to make a bad decision. And I wanted to do everything I could to open his eyes to, Hey, you’ve hired me to tell you these strategies. And I’d really like for you to listen to me, but if you don’t, you’re the business owner, you’re the boss, you get to make that decision.

Josh Ramsey

So I just ran the equation, gave it to him. And it turns out he didn’t run it because of that equation, because the math just didn’t add up. But there’s been other times when we look at a mailing campaign and we do a direct targeting mailing campaign.

Josh Ramsey

And while that seems very old school, we created a targeted list of companies that we knew without a shadow of a doubt within 12 months would hire our type of service. So the client’s type of service, they would hire and work with that company within 12 months, or they would make a change to a new company in the same industry within 12 months.

Josh Ramsey

So by targeting them directly, we were able to calculate if we spend, and I’m going to use numbers here, I’m going to make them up. But if we spend, let’s say $1 ,000 per prospect, we realized, wow, that was too much because we want to go after a hundred, because of our ROI, profit margin, what are we selling the product at, all those other little details that we have to pay attention to in the operational side, and then how much the budget is.

Josh Ramsey

And then we are able to adjust and make smart decisions based on logic and math. Because if I tell you, you’re going to sell a product at $500, but it’s going to cost you $800 to advertise it. And that means that you have to generate 30 leads because of your closing percentage.

Josh Ramsey

The math simplified, even though I probably glazed over a lot there, it comes back to, you’re identifying that it’s probably not a good investment if your numbers don’t add up.

MARC GUBERTI

And looking at those numbers is really important for any investment and Josh brings up a key point that mysterious factors where If you just do a minimal like you dip your toe in and you’re able to see if this concept works or not It helps you make better decisions So i’m wondering for people who feel like they’re like these mysterious things like, you know Like how can we get better at just like doing like a small test to see if something works or not?

Josh Ramsey

So if I am hearing your question right, you’re asking how do we do a small test?

MARC GUBERTI

Yes.

Josh Ramsey

Well, again, it goes back to your medium now. So the medium being radio, television, you know, traditional, you know, you can do online billboards rather than a large billboard. So understanding your marketplace, understanding your personas, understanding what’s tactical marketing.

Josh Ramsey

And real quick, I wanna touch on this. There’s two sides to marketing. So a lot of people hear me talk about tactical marketing versus strategic marketing. Tactical marketing is the placement of your ads.

Josh Ramsey

It’s taking your ad and your message and putting it into a medium where people can see it or hear it, touch it, feel it. The other side of marketing is your strategic messaging. What is it that you’re trying to say?

Josh Ramsey

And more importantly, what is it that consumers are actually hearing? So a lot of times we can say something and they don’t hear it the same way. So we have to almost test our strategic message. And by testing our strategic message, we’re able to understand a lot more detail, a lot more information.

Josh Ramsey

And that helps our tactical placement because it’s easy to place an ad. And we’re gonna come back to your question here of how do you test it before you invest a heavy amount and sink your ship. But when we talk about the strategic message, it is more important than where you place it because anyone can buy a radio spot, get on the phone and rattle off a bunch of blah, blah, blah, blah, yet they have to have a strong strategic message.

Josh Ramsey

So anyone listening to this podcast, what you’re listening to is the strategic message. Does it make sense? Is it logical? And then you look at the tactical placement. The tactical placement is this podcast.

Josh Ramsey

So those are the two elements to really understand. Now, as far as your investment into it and how you can test it, you really wanna just think outside the box. So I use another approach. And again, I have principles and methods that I work off of that I have tested a year over year campaign over campaign, more than 10 ,000 campaigns since the early 2000s.

Josh Ramsey

And I call it the whiteboard effect. And the whiteboard effect is what’s the best case scenario? And you whiteboard it out and you narrow it down and you figure out what could work. And a salesman would tell you that you can’t do certain things, but it’s your money.

Josh Ramsey

So you get to make the final choice. So the perfect quick story for you is I called up a radio guy and I wanted to place an ad. When I called him, I said, hey, I wanna place an ad and I wanna create what’s called bookends.

Josh Ramsey

And back at the time, they didn’t understand what bookends were. So a bookend is on the front end or the back end of a segment, you go into a commercial break on the radio. So we wanted to buy a 30 second segment and we wanted to put a 15 second ad on the back end any time the music ended.

Josh Ramsey

Then they would run all the commercials and then we wanted to plug in another 15 seconds before the music came back on. Now, radio stations do that quite often and they do it a lot more, but back in the early 2000s, they didn’t do it as much.

Josh Ramsey

Most of the stations did not do it at all. So we found the market, the radio that we wanted to do and we came in and negotiated that out. So testing comes back to being innovative in the marketplace.

Josh Ramsey

So if you haven’t been able to be innovative in the marketplace and you haven’t figured out how to test the waters, that’s when sometimes you need to reach out to an agency. You need to reach out to a marketing individual to say, hey, what’s your experience?

Josh Ramsey

What have you done? Because at the end of the day, truly when it comes to marketing, you find a cream of the crop, the best marketing guys. But to be able to tell the difference between any of those marketing guys is to really understand the case studies that they’ve done and what the results were from those case studies.

MARC GUBERTI

I mean, this is just really great stuff, like radio ads, that may not be for everyone, but again, that’s Josh knowing who his persona is. And it also really boils down to just doing a small test before you want to invest a ton of money into something.

MARC GUBERTI

So I mean, this episode I feel like has been filled with a ton of insights. I think if you’ve enjoyed this episode, you should definitely follow Josh’s work. If you are in need of an advertising agency, Josh could be the guy for you.

MARC GUBERTI

So where are some good places like we could just find your work and continue following you on your journey.

Josh Ramsey

Yeah. So I appreciate the question. I appreciate the time. One way is just to follow my website. We’re about to launch, depending on when people hear this podcast, we’re about to launch a strategy marketing room and you can go through my website, jrcmo.com like chief marketing officer .com.

Josh Ramsey

So jrcmo.com and there you’ll find a lot of free tools. I’ve published the largest SEO library in the world. This SEO library has every element of SEO out there. So you can go, you can do a search, you can learn for yourself about what are the different types of SEO.

Josh Ramsey

We have a lot of free offers that we pop up. There’s conferences that I teach nationwide so you can check out what cities I’m going to be in in the coming year. And then you can also find me on social media, facebook.com/jrcmo.

Josh Ramsey

And then again, just Google Josh Ramsey. And it’s funny, my biggest competitor online is a Canadian punk rock singer. But he spells his name S A Y and mine is S E Y. So you have to type in Josh Ramsey marketing and make sure that you don’t follow the Canadian punk rock singer unless that’s what you like.

Josh Ramsey

So I’m hoping he’ll do a podcast and bring me on and talk to me. And that way I can, I can create the difference, please. Because if anyone ever sees my picture, you’ll see a bald guy versus the Canadian punk rock who has a really nice haircut.

MARC GUBERTI

Well, I’ll definitely have links in the show notes. There could be a Josh and Josh podcast in the future, but I do appreciate you for taking the time to come on break through success, sharing how we can get over this revenue plateau because this is really great info for any business owner out there.

Josh Ramsey

Thanks Mark, thanks for having me.