2009 is here, and if you haven’t finished your annual revenue projections, I know you’ll be focusing on them this week. 

Revenue forecasting is tricky: It’s easy to record numbers in a spreadsheet, but challenging to determine, with confidence, the concrete details of how to achieve them. It’s even more challenging to know what to change if you get off track during the year. 

My experience has taught me that the best way to forecast revenue with a high degree of certainty is this: tie revenue forecasts to marketing activities and unit sales projections.  This helps eliminate guesswork and gives me comfort that my forecasts are achievable. 

I prefer the “bottom up” forecasting method–starting with units sold—to the “top down” method, which assumes a percentage rate of growth or market share captured. Check out the fundamentals of revenue forecasting (courtesy of Pragmatic Marketing) for a deeper discussion about the top-line forecast. 

Why do I prefer this approach? It 

• Forces me to have a deeper understanding of my markets;
• Produces measurable milestones;
• Allows me to correct the course sooner when things change;
• Gives me a stronger understanding of what’s working; and
• Makes it easier to calculate marketing ROI.

Most small to midsize companies operate with a revenue forecast and a loose marketing budget, but they’re rarely tied together and/or supported with a marketing plan. 

“I want to grow revenue 25% this year” 

How do you respond when your CEO asks for a plan to go from $ 24 MM to $30 MM in revenue by the end of 2009? Here’s how I’d approach it, with an explanation of how to tie your revenue forecast to your marketing plan and unit sales forecast. (Note that this is geared toward B2B companies.) 

Start with units sold 

Using the bottom up method, break down your 2008 units sold by product/service per month. Then, ramp up unit sales for the products which you’re projecting growth for 2009 (and decrease others in decline). To determine which products to ramp up, think about where you’re going to spend your marketing budget. I use an Excel model that allows me to easily change unit projections that flow through to the total revenue number. Keep adjusting your unit sales numbers until they hit the $30 MM target. 

Focus on the high-level marketing plan 

After you have a model that shows the unit sales required to hit your target, focus on the marketing activities required to generate those new sales. Consider general campaign costs and your budget and match those to the number of new customers you need. Review your historical metrics and customer acquisition costs to see if you’re in the ballpark. Are they in sync and realistic? If they are, then move to the next step. If not, then move back to step one and keep adjusting your unit sales projections. Repeat until you have a plausible projection. 

Create detailed marketing campaign goals 

Once you’ve synched your marketing budget to the new activity required to support the growth, sharpen your pencil and define the details. What marketing campaign goals should you set? Don’t worry about the campaign creative part. Just focus on the metrics per medium. Example mediums could be direct mail, email, search engine marketing (organic or PPC), partnerships, telemarketing, publicity, trade shows or traditional media like print and radio.

Then, project the number of impressions from each campaign, your lead conversion rate, your sales cycle and the number of customers that come out of the sales funnel. Use your historical metrics for each different medium, or if you’re using the medium for the first time, use standard projections. If you’re using multiple mediums in a single campaign, combine the costs and project the unit sales that they’ll produce. 

Then, determine the costs you’ll incur to acquire your target number of leads for each medium. Do you have enough budget to generate the number of leads you’ll need? 

Analyze & refine 

If you don’t have enough budget, then try moving it to the mediums with the lowest acquisition cost per customer. If that doesn’t work, then you’re stuck: Either you need to lower your revenue target, or increase your marketing budget. And if you find that your marketing budget might be cut, make sure not to cut the wrong part of the marketing budget.

After you settle on the right mix, make sure to record the key metrics you need to hit to achieve your revenue target. Measure your actual metrics as the year progresses, and make any “in flight” adjustments (shifting budget to better performing campaigns). 

Share your plan with confidence, execute daily and measure carefully. 

The results 

By this time next year, you’ll be able to show exactly how you achieved the 25% top-line revenue growth goal: by medium, campaign, number of impressions, number of leads, and units sold. And if you don’t hit the goal, you’ll be able to show exactly where the projections didn’t meet reality, and adjust for the future. 

This level of detail should impress any SMB business leader.

The holidays are a great time to take inventory of the past year, think about your plans for 2009 and catch up on your reading. 

Before you update your reading list, check out these 10 books that every marketing, sales and business growth consultant should know. Each is a must-read, but if you don’t have time for all of them, read the online summaries and understand the impact that each can have on your clients’ businesses and on your practice. 

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath and Dan Heath.

This transformational guide delivers detailed explanations and case study examples about how to effectively communicate ideas to the masses. 

Apply their SUCCES principles to your clients’ messages and campaigns. 

Why Most Things Fail: Evolution, Extinction & Economics by Paul Ormerod. 

An intellectual (and dense) read by British economist Paul Ormerod, this book studies 100 years of data to determine why products and companies fail. You’ll be surprised at the results! 

Use to shape your CEO clients’ long-term perspective about their products and company.

 
Positioning: The Battle for Your Mind by Al Ries and Jack Trout.

It’s a classic with principles still relevant 20 years after initial publication. 

Review the concepts each year with each of your clients to refine their company or product strategy.

The New Rules of Marketing & PR by David Meerman Scott.

A “new” classic, Mr. Scott delivers a step-by-step guide of how to transition from traditional interruption-based advertising to inbound marketing to reach buyers directly. 

Use this indispensible guide to plan your clients’ 2009 marketing campaigns

Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin.

A quick read, Mr. Godin outlines how to leverage the internet to organize and lead people with a common interest. 

Understand the concepts and reconsider all of your clients’ customer retention programs and social media visibility.

Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne.

A best-seller from Harvard Business School Press, authors Kim and Mauborgne outline how to create a new market space to make competition irrelevant.

Apply their concepts and formulas during strategy sessions with your clients.

Marketing Champions by Roy Young, Allen Weiss and David Stewart 

This in-depth study illuminates what’s broken with the marketing function and corporate marketing department, and outlines the steps businesses can take to fix them. 

Use with your bigger clients to understand how to integrate the marketing and sales departments, and how to incorporate an effective marketing process into your smaller clients’ companies.

A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink.

This ground-breaking book predicts the new aptitudes that will be in the greatest demand in the U.S. after the transition from the Information Age to the Conceptual Age.

Apply the aptitudes to your clients’ teams to determine who should be involved in future product development and campaign creative design.

The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference by Malcolm Gladwell 

Best-seller illuminates how ideas and trends gain popularity.  

Consider the case studies while designing product launches, defining target markets and creating new campaign concepts.

Mavericks at Work by William Taylor and Polly LaBarre.  
 

Review detailed case studies about innovators that went against conventional thinking to achieve phenomenal success. 

Consider each concept during any strategy or marketing campaign planning session.

And finally, the most important of all:

You, Inc.: The Art of Selling Yourself by Harry Beckwith and Christine Clifford Beckwith.

Stories, tips and examples of how to effectively sell yourself in any situation. 

If you can’t sell yourself, how can you be a successful consultant? 

Happy holidays!

Didn’t win that last proposal?  Having trouble converting new contacts into meetings?

Your website might be the reason. 

Raintoday.com’s 2009 version of their “How Clients Buy” report shows that consultant’s websites are becoming more influential to buyers than in previous years. Their key finding shows that 

• In 2005, 69% of buyers assigned websites at least “some influence” over their decision to engage in initial discussions with that service provider and only 51% of buyers assigned websites at least “some influence” over the ultimate purchasing decision.
• In 2008, 83% of buyers report the service provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their decision to engage in initial discussions with that service provider and nearly three-quarters (74%) of buyers said the service provider’s website holds at least “some influence” over their ultimate decision to buy services from the provider. 

Influence of Provider’s Website over Initial Discussions and Ultimate Decision to Hire a Service Provider

If you’re looking for data and analysis about how companies select professional services providers, this is your report.

Not sure whether you need a website revamp? You definitely need one if your site 

• Uses a 1990s design that your nephew/neighbor created;
• Is verbose and doesn’t contain graphics (because people scan);
• Looks and sounds like all of your competitors; or
• Doesn’t communicate the value that you can deliver. 

So where should you start? First, determine your website’s role in your sales process. Should it

• Generate leads?
• Facilitate the buying process?
• Share documents with your clients?

If you answered “yes” to the first two, make sure that you build your new site using organic search best practices. If your site just needs to function as your corporate brochure, make sure that it supports your message and accurately communicates your brand.

You know that internet video growth is exploding. comScore reported that U.S. internet users viewed more than 10 billion videos online last December alone. 

We’ve all seen the guys dropping Mentos into the Coke bottles. But how can a team of “boring” consultants use video to deliver their message? 

Don Rigby and the GrowthANSWERS team created a comic series to highlight the things that business owners shouldn’t do. Their video promotes the series and their monthly executive events. If you’re in the Atlanta area, check out their monthly Executive2Executive event December 17 at the Georgian Club.

Today we finally launched our revamped marketing [m.o.] content website. It’s called Process, Tips and Strategy for Business Marketers. 

The new website contains all of the previous marketing how-to articles from our former Marketing Tips from the Trenches blog, and detail about the marketing process. We’ll post new how-to articles weekly, and the site is free. Grab the feed here if you’re interested. 

We also added our first group of founding distributors’ profiles under the Consultants section. This advertising is one component of our Certified Distributor program. Since we no longer offer marketing services and focus solely on our products, we want to direct inbound leads to our partners, who have access to our tools (as well as their own expertise). 

Our Website Revamp 

Speaking of partners, thanks to Identity Studios for the new marketing [m.o.] site design.  They also did this site. They’re a young creative agency that’s growing rapidly and performing great work!

Since we’re finishing up a new article about the steps of a website content revamp, I thought I’d share more information about the marketing [m.o.] update. 

Our old site had a custom content-manager built in. It seemed like a good idea in 2006, but we wanted a more widely-accepted platform with easy customization and support, that’s very SEO friendly. We decided on WordPress, and chose to modify the Thesis theme. 

We encountered numerous challenges with Google while importing our existing blog and moving our content into WordPress, without losing links or PageRank. It turns out Google indexed well over 1,000 pages from our old site, because of the different subdomains we had created for the back-end of our application. Then, we had some problems with a plug-in scrambling our sitemap with each update, so Google Webmaster would show a growing list of 404 errors with each new crawl. After this experience, I think we’ll stay away from subdomains and sitemap plug-ins in the future. Not fun. Lesson learned. 

The good part is that updating content in WordPress is a breeze (once it’s setup properly). Login, cut & paste and viola–new pages! In fact, we’re using WordPress for this blog. Once we fix our image loader, we’ll add some photos to spice up our posts.

Upcoming Consulting M.O. v3.0 

Now that this project is complete, we can shift our focus to our upcoming new application. We started coding right before Thanksgiving, after spending three months working through specifications and requirements. The new version will shift from a static web app to a content platform, making it easier for our users and partners to modify our content, access the new content we’re producing, and create and store their own.

More to come …

Your client’s competitive positioning strategy is the entire foundation for their business. 

• How is their product differentiated from their competitors?
• What is their unique value proposition?
• What is their market niche?
• What mind share do they capture? 

If you’re working on your client’s brand strategy, begin with their competitive positioning and craft their market profile. Profiling is similar to an artist’s rendering: It is a visual picture of the market and a typical buyer’s distinctive characteristics.  An accurate market profile allows you to separate your client’s potential prospects from those less likely to buy. Position their brand solely for the people or businesses that match their profile. 

A Review of Classical Market Profiling 

Let’s review the traditional methods for generating your client’s market profile. Examine each aspect and quantify your results. 

Industry Study (for B2B)

• What industries does your client serve? Identify the appropriate SIC codes.
• Is their product marketable to more than one industry category?
• What is the sales potential in other secondary industries?
• Is the overall business category expanding or contracting?

 Geographical Demographics

• Define the geographical location of your client’s customers.
• Is your client’s product positioned locally, nationally, or globally?
• Is their product multi-cultural or narrowly defined?

 Demographic Traits

B2B Analysis

• Quantify the size of their typical target business.
• Are these businesses start-ups, mature firms or companies in a declining phase?
• Define how these companies are owned: privately-held, public, not-for-profit or municipal.

End-User Market Analysis

• What are the general demographic descriptors of your client’s target customer: age, gender, income, marital status, or family status?
• Do they have similar occupations, clubs or related interests that will affect their buying habits?

 Size & Trends

For Both B2B and Consumer Markets

• Identify the number of potential consumer or commercial prospects.
• What are their spending habits?
• Determine their target’s average income or annual business revenue.
• Chart the individual demographics trends or business trends.

 A Touch of Modern Marketing 

You’ve now identified the quantifiable characteristics of your market profile. But the picture isn’t complete without the human element. Your client will have a better understanding of their buyers if they understand their buyers’ psychological motivations.

 Examine:

• What issues do their customers face, whether business or personal?
• What are their pains and their desires?
• Who is the decision-maker for the purchase? Look deep!
• Are there multiple decision-makers or influencers?
• Review the standard purchasing process and the key players.
• What is the buyer personality? What unique psychological process is a common factor?

Can you now paint a complete picture for your client? Disseminate this precise market profile to everyone that makes strategic decisions. Recommend that they judge positioning and strategic choices through this framework.

Most importantly, ensure that their brand strategy decisions align with each “typical” prospect in the acknowledged market. An accurate, focused and verifiable market profile will lay a strong foundation for your client’s optimal brand strategy.

Consultants understand the power of quality content and intellectual capital. It’s often the foundation for their entire practice, and can generate leads, support a brand, train employees, facilitate service delivery and educate clients. 

But if you’re using content to sell a product on the web, how much content is too much? 

It’s a question I think about every day.  We sell content integrated with web-based software to consultants. There’s a tremendous volume of content in the private area of our site, and we decided to put a healthy dose of it in the public area also, to 

• Give consultants samples of our offering;
• Generate leads; and
• Build our brand. 

Since we’re a web product, or prospects are scattered all over the world, and we’re not able to take advantage of a face-to-face selling environment for our fairly complex product. Instead, we use our content to facilitate our selling process, via the web and email, so our prospects can 

• Understand how our product approaches business growth strategies;
• Review the tools that we offer; and
• Determine whether our product can help them achieve their goals.

We publically display less than 5% of our available content. Sometimes it works as planned, sometimes not: Some prospects have been overwhelmed with the volume of content. Even though our consultant clients are intellectuals, they face the same time constraints as everyone else.

Our strategy is to strike a balance between showing “not enough” and throwing the “whole kitchen sink” at them.  The end goal is to entice interested visitors to contact us to start the process.

Yesterday I was talking with a consultant about her event planning business and how, for example, she could design email campaigns to better promote her clients’ events.

I pulled up the email subject in our web-app and quickly read off the list of email marketing tools: 

Email Brainstorming - helps you generate ideas for campaigns to meet various business goals
Email Campaign Strategy - develop an over-arching strategy: goals, audience, message, offer, and timing
Email Campaign Plan - define the timing, format, content, fulfillment, tracking requirements and launch plan
Email Technology Requirements - checklist of typical features you’d want from an email service provider or software
Email Creative Guidelines - a template for writing and editing the copy; includes notes for the graphics
Email Testing Plan - helps you set up a test to measure & improve your email campaign
Email Newsletter Program - general tips for content, generating subscriptions and handling signups
Email Response Rate Estimates - tips for estimating response rates
Email Budget - tips for creating your budget
Email Pre-Launch Checklist - a to-do list to tackle before your campaign goes out
Improve Your Email Campaigns - tips for improving your response rate
Email Campaign Results - a template for sharing your results and documenting your learning for the next campaign
Email Marketing.xls - calculate numeric goals, compare lists and evaluate testing

What was her response? “WOW!  That is so detailed! And that’s just one subject!”

So I realized that we could still use MORE content to better display our offering. The challenge is to serve it to prospects in the right sequence, without overwhelming them.

Do you use content to generate leads and sell yourself on the web? If so, have you been able to find the perfect balance yet? 

If you’re a time-strapped consultant that needs a “quick-and-dirty” review to see if our offering might fit your practice, try this:

 1.  Review this page for our program overview. 

2.   Download and scan our Strategic Marketing Process eBook. Our tools will walk you through the “Key Concepts and Steps” section of each subject. 

3.  Spend 5 minutes reviewing sample tools.  Click on the document icons to open each. 

4. Email me and I’ll send you links to private screen cast demos that show the client area and explain how most consultants are using the tools.

Last Friday, Jim Stengel, the former Proctor & Gamble global marketing chief, left P&G and setup his own shop.

What is Mr. Stengel offering? Purpose-based marketing services.

Purpose-based marketing is a concept that shifts the focus from a product’s features to how it improves customers’ lives. P&G has successfully demonstrated the concept with its Pampers and Safeguard brands:

• Pampers focused on helping moms raise happy and healthy babies; and
• Commander Safeguard, a diarrhea-fighting mascot, dramatically improved soap sales in Pakistan.

While this approach might be difficult for B2C brands during an economic downturn, the trend, according to J. Walker Smith, president of market-research firm Yankelovich, is clear: Consumers want brands that have a purpose beyond materialism; they want brands that are more fulfilling.

For marketing consultants with B2C clients, you can apply this concept to your clients’ campaigns: Focus your messages on the ultimate goals of the consumer using the product, and attach your product to the story and content.

For B2B clients, this is more challenging. Many B2C trends apply to B2B markets, but since B2B brands have far more market touch-points, it’s tough to make an impact with a single campaign. If your client has an eight-figure advertising budget, go ahead and address it at the campaign level.

Since the majority of your clients don’t have these resources, try revamping your client’s brand strategy to establish them as a thought-leader in their field. Shape the brand to be more fulfilling to customer decision-makers, and to solve a greater problem. It could be as simple as shifting the brand focus to emphasize the overt benefits instead of features and functional benefits.

Content is a great way to reshape a B2B brand. Internet distribution makes this relatively simple and cost effective. Better yet, the content not only becomes a brand builder, but a lead-generator, and a catalyst for almost any integrated marketing campaign (which delivers buy-in from the sales manager).

If you’d like a step-by-step guide, check out The New Rules of Marketing and PR by David Meerman Scott.

B2B brands are trickier to define than consumer product brands. They often represent far more than a simple, tangible product that we can hold, feel and use for our own enjoyment. 

One way to tackle your client’s brand strategy is to think of your client’s company as a person. Focus on their human elements. Who do they look like to an objective observer? Are they a big, mean biker guy riding a Harley? Are they a friendly female librarian in her mid-sixties? Are they a twenty-something programmer with spiky hair and attitude? 

Example

Apple has been doing this for a couple of years with their TV ads. We’ve all seen them: The Mac guy is the young, hip dude and PC is the portly guy with wireframe glasses. Microsoft has started fighting back with ads interviewing all different types of people claiming that “they’re a PC,” but the powerful imagery of the first ads succinctly reinforces what many of us think: PCs stodgy and boring; Macs are hip.

Steps

• Imagery is powerful, so use this concept with your clients. When shaping your client’s brand strategy, start by listing the top three things that the brand should mean to their customers. These are typically the reasons why customers buy. 
• Now, list 3 to 5 human personality traits that describe the person. Are they trustworthy? Efficient? Knowledgeable? Caring? Creative? Aggressive? Turn their company into a person and use detailed description to bring him/her to life. 
• You should have a pretty clear picture of the “person” that represents the brand if your brand “means” and your traits are aligned. If they contradict each other, this will be challenging. 
• Finally, boil it down even further to the one word, or one thing that the brand stands for. If you can’t choose a single word, use a phrase instead, but keep it short! 
• Make sure to differentiate what the brand aspires to be, and what the brand really is. Complete an independent brand audit to check alignment.  If they’re different, create a long-term plan to shift the brand perception to the desired personality, means and phrase. 

Results

The singular focus or phrase is the most powerful way to represent a brand. Southwest Airlines is a great example of the power of a singular band focus.  What business is Southwest in? They’re in the freedom business. That mantra, or mission, has driven the company’s operational and marketing strategy for the last 25 years.

Most importantly, have your client commit to this brand focus. It should drive strategic decisions in pricing, distribution and marketing for years to come. The greater their focus, the more succes they should achieve.

Every cloud has a silver lining. The current economic slowdown may be the impetus many executives need to start their own consulting practice. 

The U.S. Labor Department predicts that the employment rate for consultants will grow more than twice as fast as the average for all other disciplines. 

Some start a practice out of necessity. Others are chasing their dream career. But almost all find that creating a consulting practice involves more than just practicing an area of expertise. 

Sarah Needleman of the Wall Street Journal highlights 5 valuable steps to make the transition easier. Her first recommendation - know what you’re getting into - highlights an important point for all new consultants to understand: Most consultants spend 50% or more of their time marketing and selling. 

If you’re a new consultant, make sure to keep marketing after you land your first few projects. It can be challenging to develop and manage marketing campaigns continuously while delivering client work. One way to handle it is to understand and use a marketing process. You can also partner with other consultants to share leads, co-market and provide support services. 

Ms. Needleman’s final point is also something to keep at the top of your priority list: Create a succinct, 30 second elevator pitch. Most consultants rely on networking events and face-to-face meetings to gain new clients. The elevator pitch introduces your brand, your competitive positioning, and can start (or end) your selling process. Create it, test it, and refine it. It can make or break your launch.