If you're trying to reach those metrics
Posted: Wed Dec 18, 2024 7:56 am
then it's enough to just constantly focus on the front end of the funnel, the marketing and sales function. You need to also be thinking about, okay, is my delivery team, is my customer service team, are all these other areas of the business creating enough of a compelling case that makes customers not only happy with the service, but raving fans of your service, because once they start doing that, the maths just adds up. Suddenly you're able to hit growth goals, knowing that, oh, well, we retain clients with such a high level that we don't have to replace them, we can just use that as a bedrock foundation of revenue and add more on top of it. And suddenly when we look at the big numbers, when we look, oh, we need 10 million in net new business, well, we can look with netherlands girl number predictable reliability on the data saying, well, six of that is going to come from referrals and you can know that for certain.
And I think that's one of the critical areas is that people need to understand that it's not just about what you do at the top of the funnel, it's not just about sales needs to prospect more, marketing needs to drive more leads. It's not just about that, it is about the whole system of your business. And when you can start to bring that perspective as a marketer, suddenly you are talking the language of the business, not just the language of marketing.
You're going to set yourself apart from other marketers. You're also going to build a lot of clout with your leadership team, and you're going to rise in your career far more substantially than if you just focus on the areas of your core expertise. It's not that you can't do that, it's not that it's bad to be really good at what you do, but at the end of the day, all businesses, no matter what industry still measure themselves by fundamentally the same metrics, how much income are we bringing in? How much expenses are going out? How much money do we have to reinvest in the business? If you can start having those conversations, you'll do really well.
NICK: Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. And it sounds like you guys have hit that golden alignment between marketing, sales and customer success. And now the flywheel is essentially churning out ... What does HubSpot call them? Promoters? It's not the promoters. What is the life cycle stage I'm thinking of? Advocates. Exactly, exactly, people that are now promoting you and word of mouth becomes your best, best channel. So it's awesome to see that concentrated work over a few years finally get you to this point where you're now in that rare but elite group of marketers who can leverage the flywheel to your advantage.
PATRICK: Yeah, I really appreciate that. But as I would say, we're still just getting started because as much as we broke through a big barrier, 10 million is a big barrier within Gartner circles in terms of most companies within our space will hit 10 million or get close to 10 million and then decline. We smashed through that barrier, that was great. Now I'm looking at the next one. Now I'm looking, how do we hit 50 million? How do we hit 100 million?
And when you start thinking in those terms of scales, that's when it gets really exciting, because then you get to start envisaging, not just what my marketing team does today, but who are the people I need to bring into this organization, who can do what we need to do at those levels? And then you're building a really huge function, a function that you can be proud of, a growth story you can be proud of. And these are the really exciting times. I think one of the things that people often forget about growth, a lot of people get stressed by growth. I understand, it's in the name, growing pains. However, one of the things that people forget about growth is the benefits in that what it allows you to do is it allows you to ... You get to do really exciting work. You get to do that work at an even larger scale, make a larger impact and do it in a way that ironically has less pressure, because I can tell you, the most pressure I've ever felt in my career has always been when we've been so scrappy that we've had very little resources. Once you have a lot of resources, you've got more to play with.
NICK: Yeah. Then you can experiment more and test more. And by the way, that was evangelist was what I was looking for, the word.
PATRICK: There we go.
NICK: Well, I feel like we could talk about this stuff all day. This has been fascinating. And especially doing it in a service business is especially hard, when product you can almost sometimes stumble into one channel and it's the rev engine behind your growth and it can get you to those milestones. But in service, and I can relate obviously as a marketing agency, it's a grind because even if the channel is working, you still have to close every sale.
PATRICK: Yeah, couldn't agree more. I think one of the areas with SaaS, and no disrespect to many of my SaaS colleagues, I understand what they do is incredibly challenging, but if you become so embedded that you are the tool of choice, you'll seldom have to sell. You look at many of the areas that marketers have to spend on, something as simple as CRM, right? Well, HubSpot, Salesforce, you've got a few other startups in the space, but those are the anchors, right? Those are the infrastructure. It's a lot easier to sell that. Whereas if you're a services business, you've constantly got to be proving yourself.
I always look back at even the early stages of Rootstrap, like 2016, we worked with Tony Robbins and that was amazing, but that was then, this is now. Now we constantly have to think, okay, well who's the next client we go after? Who's the next big name we would love to get on our roster? Who are the other partners that perhaps are small now, but will be large in the future? That was the classic story with MasterClass. MasterClass, when they joined us, they were still an infant startup. They had raised ... I think it was after their series A, when they first started working with us. Now they're a $2 billion valuation. We didn't know it at the time, but we had a good feeling about it. And when you have those stories, you can really do some damage.
NICK: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's a nice logo right there. Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. I just wanted to ask one last thing before we leave it off. What is one kind of growth hack? And you covered a lot of really, really great ground, but what is something that our fellow marketers watching can implement right away, next week, this month?
PATRICK: Okay. One thing that they can implement absolutely today is go and get the tool Crystal Knows, that's Crystal as in a shiny crystal, and Knows as in I know. That is my absolute go-to. It's a very cheap product. It's a extension that sits over the top of LinkedIn and it gives a breakdown of a person's psychological profile based on the DISC assessment. And it is so valuable because you're just able to speak to the person on the other end in ways that they would understand. So when you speak to someone who's a conscientious type, for example, a developer, you're able to use facts and figures. If it's an influential type, you're able to spin story and narrative and focus on that. It is one of the best tools I've ever had for outreach. I use it constantly. And I found it. The biggest reason I knew that this tool was going to work is I ran it on myself and the first thing it came up with was, appreciates a sarcastic comment. And since I knew that was correct, I'm like, "This tool is golden." So yeah, Crystal Knows.
NICK: I'm checking it out as soon as we close off here. That's great. Wow. Okay. Well, Patrick, thank you so much. This has been great, really insightful. Where can people find out more about you and Rootstrap?
PATRICK: So you can either visit our website, www.rootstrap, R-O-O-T-S-T-R-A-P.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesward.
And I think that's one of the critical areas is that people need to understand that it's not just about what you do at the top of the funnel, it's not just about sales needs to prospect more, marketing needs to drive more leads. It's not just about that, it is about the whole system of your business. And when you can start to bring that perspective as a marketer, suddenly you are talking the language of the business, not just the language of marketing.
You're going to set yourself apart from other marketers. You're also going to build a lot of clout with your leadership team, and you're going to rise in your career far more substantially than if you just focus on the areas of your core expertise. It's not that you can't do that, it's not that it's bad to be really good at what you do, but at the end of the day, all businesses, no matter what industry still measure themselves by fundamentally the same metrics, how much income are we bringing in? How much expenses are going out? How much money do we have to reinvest in the business? If you can start having those conversations, you'll do really well.
NICK: Couldn't agree more. Couldn't agree more. And it sounds like you guys have hit that golden alignment between marketing, sales and customer success. And now the flywheel is essentially churning out ... What does HubSpot call them? Promoters? It's not the promoters. What is the life cycle stage I'm thinking of? Advocates. Exactly, exactly, people that are now promoting you and word of mouth becomes your best, best channel. So it's awesome to see that concentrated work over a few years finally get you to this point where you're now in that rare but elite group of marketers who can leverage the flywheel to your advantage.
PATRICK: Yeah, I really appreciate that. But as I would say, we're still just getting started because as much as we broke through a big barrier, 10 million is a big barrier within Gartner circles in terms of most companies within our space will hit 10 million or get close to 10 million and then decline. We smashed through that barrier, that was great. Now I'm looking at the next one. Now I'm looking, how do we hit 50 million? How do we hit 100 million?
And when you start thinking in those terms of scales, that's when it gets really exciting, because then you get to start envisaging, not just what my marketing team does today, but who are the people I need to bring into this organization, who can do what we need to do at those levels? And then you're building a really huge function, a function that you can be proud of, a growth story you can be proud of. And these are the really exciting times. I think one of the things that people often forget about growth, a lot of people get stressed by growth. I understand, it's in the name, growing pains. However, one of the things that people forget about growth is the benefits in that what it allows you to do is it allows you to ... You get to do really exciting work. You get to do that work at an even larger scale, make a larger impact and do it in a way that ironically has less pressure, because I can tell you, the most pressure I've ever felt in my career has always been when we've been so scrappy that we've had very little resources. Once you have a lot of resources, you've got more to play with.
NICK: Yeah. Then you can experiment more and test more. And by the way, that was evangelist was what I was looking for, the word.
PATRICK: There we go.
NICK: Well, I feel like we could talk about this stuff all day. This has been fascinating. And especially doing it in a service business is especially hard, when product you can almost sometimes stumble into one channel and it's the rev engine behind your growth and it can get you to those milestones. But in service, and I can relate obviously as a marketing agency, it's a grind because even if the channel is working, you still have to close every sale.
PATRICK: Yeah, couldn't agree more. I think one of the areas with SaaS, and no disrespect to many of my SaaS colleagues, I understand what they do is incredibly challenging, but if you become so embedded that you are the tool of choice, you'll seldom have to sell. You look at many of the areas that marketers have to spend on, something as simple as CRM, right? Well, HubSpot, Salesforce, you've got a few other startups in the space, but those are the anchors, right? Those are the infrastructure. It's a lot easier to sell that. Whereas if you're a services business, you've constantly got to be proving yourself.
I always look back at even the early stages of Rootstrap, like 2016, we worked with Tony Robbins and that was amazing, but that was then, this is now. Now we constantly have to think, okay, well who's the next client we go after? Who's the next big name we would love to get on our roster? Who are the other partners that perhaps are small now, but will be large in the future? That was the classic story with MasterClass. MasterClass, when they joined us, they were still an infant startup. They had raised ... I think it was after their series A, when they first started working with us. Now they're a $2 billion valuation. We didn't know it at the time, but we had a good feeling about it. And when you have those stories, you can really do some damage.
NICK: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. That's a nice logo right there. Great. Well, thank you so much for sharing your time with us today. I just wanted to ask one last thing before we leave it off. What is one kind of growth hack? And you covered a lot of really, really great ground, but what is something that our fellow marketers watching can implement right away, next week, this month?
PATRICK: Okay. One thing that they can implement absolutely today is go and get the tool Crystal Knows, that's Crystal as in a shiny crystal, and Knows as in I know. That is my absolute go-to. It's a very cheap product. It's a extension that sits over the top of LinkedIn and it gives a breakdown of a person's psychological profile based on the DISC assessment. And it is so valuable because you're just able to speak to the person on the other end in ways that they would understand. So when you speak to someone who's a conscientious type, for example, a developer, you're able to use facts and figures. If it's an influential type, you're able to spin story and narrative and focus on that. It is one of the best tools I've ever had for outreach. I use it constantly. And I found it. The biggest reason I knew that this tool was going to work is I ran it on myself and the first thing it came up with was, appreciates a sarcastic comment. And since I knew that was correct, I'm like, "This tool is golden." So yeah, Crystal Knows.
NICK: I'm checking it out as soon as we close off here. That's great. Wow. Okay. Well, Patrick, thank you so much. This has been great, really insightful. Where can people find out more about you and Rootstrap?
PATRICK: So you can either visit our website, www.rootstrap, R-O-O-T-S-T-R-A-P.com, or you can find me on LinkedIn, linkedin.com/in/patrickjamesward.