Double Your Business in Just 90 Days

In this podcast episode of Open Source Growth, host Dean Denny discusses the importance of analyzing business and marketing data in order to drive growth for a software company, marketing agency, or e-commerce brand. He encourages his listeners to review the last 90 days of data and offers advice on what to look for when analyzing the data. Dean emphasizes the importance of having a solid system in place for capturing and tracking conversion data, including a CRM and data analytics studio, with HubSpot being his recommended solution.

By identifying what made the business successful over the past 90 days, SaaS entrepreneurs can develop strategies to double, triple, or 10X their business.

 

In this episode, you will learn:

1) How to analyze your business growth and marketing growth data
2) The importance of having a good means of capturing data
3) The significance of a system that gives you end-to-end tracking of conversion data
4) How to evaluate website traffic and identify what’s working and what’s not
5) The importance of keeping people engaged with videos and SEO optimized blogs
6) How to evaluate conversion rates from organic SEO and paid traffic perspectives
7) How to honestly evaluate CRM data and analyze lead sources and landing pages
8) The significance of maintaining a high-quality CRM and good data hygiene
9) The impact of having poor data hygiene and sloppy sales teams on your business growth.

 

Timestamps:

[00:01:03] – Reviewing last 90 days data.
[00:03:04] – Analyzing data for business success.
[00:06:30] – Analyze organic website performance.
[00:10:08] – Analyze CRM data for sales.
[00:12:17] – Optimize, sources, close, time, rate, analyze.
[00:12:59] – Analyze customer journey data.
[00:15:01] – Review campaigns, learn, reject, succeed.
[00:15:47] – Analyze data, improve sales, increase AOV, improve lead quality.
[00:17:45] – Driving traffic for massive growth.
[00:18:48] – Facebook remarketing works: conversions via chat.
[00:20:05] – Blow up SaaS with direct response.
[00:23:33] – Master Paid Traffic, Organic Lead Source.
[00:25:12] – Stay relevant with SEO, content.
[00:26:32] – Publish, Analyze, Scale, Repeat.
[00:27:03] – Check CRM, get HubSpot
[00:27:44] – Double business in 90 days.

Note: This podcast episode is available for free on Spotify, Apple Music, and the Owendenny.com/blog website.

—

Hey, how are you going? It’s Dean here and welcome to Open Source Growth, the number one destination for software as a service growth marketing advice, strategies, and anything you can do to double, if not triple your software as a service company in 2023. Now. Believe it or not. I’m just like you.

Sometimes I don’t actually sit down and look at marketing data. In fact, Just before. I started recording this podcast. I was bebopping away with my jazz guitar and a backing track. In fact, I love jazz guitar. I’ve been playing guitar since I was a wee little boy. I remember distinctly when I was about four or five years of age that I wanted it to be a jazz musician. And, I just loved it. I love Frank Sinatra. I loved Wes Montgomery. I love George Benson and you know what? That was one of the first dreams that I lived out in my life. But the reason why I say this is that. Before recording this podcast, I was procrastinating just like you. Just like me.

All. Not impervious to that disease called procrastination. And what was I procrastinating from? What I’ve been procrastinating from, believe it or not is going through the last 90 days of data in my business. And I’m going to encourage you to do the same thing in your software company, in your marketing agency, in your e-commerce brand, in whatever type of business that you’ve got.

It’s time to go through. At the end of each quarter, the last 90 days, the last 12 weeks, the last. Decent amount of chunk that decent chunk of time to see how you have really stacked up now. A lot of people like to do these massive convoluted analysis in regards to your business growth and why things did work and why things didn’t. And they’d be bebopping all the long around about, oh, the cost of traffic went up. CPMs are doubled. If not tripled or the cost of every click is going up three times. That’s why we haven’t grown as much. Oh the sales team didn’t do enough last month, blah, blah, blah. look. Don’t overcomplicate this because if you do this right, and you look for the right things, which I’m going to reveal to you today, the right things you need to look for in your data.

What you can do is essentially. Any good growth market or any great entrepreneur can do is determine what made you successful over the past 90 days and figure out a way, how to double triple if not 10 X, that so you can go about doubling your business in the next 90 days. It is totally possible. In fact, we’re going through that process with ourselves right now, because we didn’t have the best 90 days. Hey, we went on holidays. Hey, it was January. Hey, there’s a lot of things going on in the market, but why didn’t we succeed? This is the best part.

You can check it out because you’ve got all the data in front of you. If you’re a discerning business owner. Sorry. If you have a pad and pen with you, if you have a writing instrument, if you’ve got notes open in your iPhone or your Android or whatever. Get ready to jot down some nuggets here, because what I’m going to reveal to you is what we look for internally.

And with our clients to help them be successful by blowing up the businesses, doing the most appropriate, scalable and leveraged activities. So number one, when it comes to being able to analyze your business, Growth and your marketing growth and getting all the data in place. It’s you’ve got to number one, have a very good means of capturing your data in the first place. Now I’m not just talking about slapping a Google analytics code or Google tag manager code on your website or getting rims and reels of data from, I don’t know from Facebook ads or Google ads or whatever. What I’m talking about here is the. In order to do this efficiently, you just cannot simply rely on spreadsheets and crap like that. You need a fricking system. You need a fricking system, which gives you end to end tracking of conversion data. Now I know if you’re in the e-commerce game, you’d be really interested in things like blue whale or high ROAS.

I know in our world, especially with our clients, we totally recommend everybody have some instance of HubSpot’s so they can see end to end deal data for their customers. So if you’re a high ticket SaaS, there’s nothing more important than having something like HubSpot implemented into your business. So you can see end to end where the leads are coming from, what landing pages are they hitting? And then not only what landing pages are they hitting, what actions are they taking? And then if what actions are they taking and how are they turning into deals? The first thing you need to do before you get into this stage of analysis is have a solid CRM, Data analytics studio, in place. I’m not saying Google data studio is going to be the perfect solution. It’s a very good solution. If you want to free and cheap and cheerful way of doing this, it does need some massaging with stuff like Kissmetrics to get the right data imported into it. However, if you want to do this well.

You need a proper system. And what we would recommend is HubSpot every single day of the week, hands down, it is the ducks guts. If you’re a SaaS company or a high ticket services company. Like an MSP or a cybersecurity provider or whatever. Does, if you’re in high ticket sales the drill get HubSpot. I’ll leave a link in my in my show notes below. So you can go about getting yourself a free trial.

The next thing you then need to do. Is evaluate your website traffic. Now, this is something HubSpot does relatively well, but if you want a more granular look at things, you need to jump into Google analytics. Over the last 90 days. How did your website traffic fair with respect? To the 90 days that you’ve just gone through. So have a look at what happened between January and March, and then look at October and December. And then see from an organic perspective. What hit the website? What are we ranking for? Are we getting people through to the website without our paid ads? How is that happening? The next thing you really need to look at with your Google analytics data is have a look how long people are staying on your website for the reason why that might be the case is that.

Peoples. Choices of what they want to digest over time. That changes. So for instance, you know what used to be cool on the internet way back in the day. It’s no longer cool now, so no, one’s going to be engaging with your content. It may be high value, but it may just not be the right. Presentation.

You may need to be doing more videos, not just pumping out SEO, optimized blogs, to keep people around on your site. It’s pretty simple, but you got to move with the times, man. So again, see how long people are staying on your website for the next thing you need to have a look at is your conversion rate.

And your conversion rate on your website from an organic perspective, because at the end of the day, that’s like the ultimate litmus test. The reason why the conversion rates can often get totally misrepresented and totally skewed in our game. Is that if your conversion rate on your website, Is. Is 3%.

As a rule of thumb, you can run bad campaigns to your website to key services, pages or key feature pages or product pages or whatever. And generate leads. That’s your worst case demand generation situation. If you’re able to increase your conversion rate on your base website without offers or not, you’ve got a really good leg to stand on. If your demand generation efforts are half average.

So evaluate your conversion rate. Now, when it comes to looking at your conversion rate, look at it from an organic SEO perspective, but also look at it from a paid traffic perspective too. So when it comes to your conversion rate, You have to have the right events set up, is what would you consider a conversion rate? Your conversion rate on phone calls may only be like 0.5 of a percent.

But your conversion rate on say the marketing qualified lead or subscribing to your website may be 1%. Or people booking a call with you may be 3%, but again, have your conversion rates mapped against your conversion actions and then analyze. What conversion actions took place and see not only which conversions actions took place and where most of them took place. See what source and medium the traffic came from. Was it from paid ads? Was it from Facebook, was from whatever.

Because then you’re going to start seeing what conversion. What audience is most conversion centric. See the biggest problem that we see with all of our clients. Not only do they have no marketing structure. Or no marketing strategy or no marketing calendar or promotional activity. They often just have a marketing strategy, which is simply not sales led. And you need to get that totally resolved. If you want to succeed in growing your business.

So what I mean by sales led is that everything you do with your demand generation, everything you do with your brand. At some point needs to be attributed to getting the sales team active. So again, Looking at your conversion actions, what is actually leading to the sales team being active? What actions are getting them on the phone? What sources of traffic are providing the sales team with the most sales hungry buyers? That’s what we need to have look at, so you’ve looked at your website. You’ve looked how long people are staying on the pages for you’ve seen your conversion rates for the right actions you figured out and identified. Which of those conversion rates? Attributed to which traffic sources. So then you can identify, okay, these things are scaling well.

Now you’ve got like a top down view of what’s going on. You need to then honestly evaluate.

You honestly need to evaluate your CRM data. Once again. Now the best part about having a CRM. Especially HubSpot is that you get into end tracking. What we analyze every 90 days is the number of leads that came through our website. What landing pages did they come through? What traffic sources did they come through and did they close? How long did they close? How long did it take to close them?

And then what can we do into improve things? So there’s a handful of metrics that we look at. First things first when it comes to the deal flow in the sales team. We look at the following things. Number one, the source of the lead. Number two, the landing page in which the lead landed on first, was it a Facebook offer page or was it organic SEO page?

Was it a just a standard Facebook traffic campaign or a LinkedIn traffic campaign. Did they come through this podcast that you’re listening to today? Like we look at the source of how they landed on the website. Once we’ve identified the source. As to how they’ve landed on the website and then how they’ve gone about inquiring. What we then do is we look at, okay, what’s the show up rate from particular sources. If they inquire with the website. What’s the likelihood we’ll be able to get on a phone call within 48 hours of inquiry. Okay, cool. How do we optimize that? And what sources are performing well? The next thing we want to look at too, is the time it takes for the deal to go from. Initiated to closed now.

You need to also weigh in the deals that don’t close and why they don’t close. So in that 90 day period. Like what your average deal closed what your average deal close time is for us, it’s normally anywhere between. Two to three weeks. And then our closing rate is generally anywhere between anywhere between 40 to 65% every quarter.

So we’ve analyzed. How much. Oh, how many of the deals where they came from? What landing pages they came through, what was the overall customer journey? We’ve looked at how long they take to close.. What’s the average order value of each of these deals that we do. And then we map that against the last 90 days.

Because what you can then start to see by analyzing this data, is that okay? Certain traffic sources are fast, the close certain traffic sources. If they come through certain landing pages, You can, your average order value is wildly increased. The referral traffic closes more aggressively. Does it, or does the D do the word of mouth referrals perform better?

You have to have all this started in front of you. Uh, In order to determine whether or not your marketing is working for you. Now, again, this is going to be a massive emphasis here and I can’t. Go short on this and you simply cannot skimp. Maintaining a high quality CRM and a really good data warehouse for all of your growth marketing data is fundamental to getting this right. If you have poor data hygiene, if you have poor collection processes, if your sales team sloppy.

Kiss your chances of growing your business goodbye, because you’re not going to actually have anything you can paint by numbers with. And that’s the whole point of growth marketing. See. Doubling your business. Isn’t just a matter of doubling the number of leads that come into your business because you may not be able to afford that.

But if you can increase the number of leads in your business up 20%, if you can increase the show up rate for your first meeting by 20%, if you can then improve your closing rate from say 40% up to 50%. That’s where the real magic happens because those compound effects. As what double was your business. And you can totally achieve that in the next 90 days, if you do the growth analysis. Correct. See what you want to go about finding through your 90 day quarterly marketing review is what campaigns worked. And why did they work? What actions did your campaigns drive?

What hooks, what did we learn about our customer? In the last 90 days. And what are the fish we wish to reject to make this business blow up? See, these are really good questions to ask yourself every 90 days, because if you don’t guess what game over, it’s not going to work. See you later. Stay tell your story, walking.

I can’t emphasize to you guys enough. That by just analyzing the data every 90 days that enables your business to grow like wildfire. Simple things like improving your sales closing rate. We’ll really make robust growth. A possibility for you. Increasing your average order value by 20%.

That’s going to provide you with robust revenue growth. Improving the quality of your leads by say 50%. That will do the same thing. Again, I’m not saying generate more low cost sales qualified leads or generating more low cost marketing qualified leads. I’m talking about lead quality.

Are you scoring your leads? So if I was in your position,

I would ask myself, what can I do in the next 90 days based on the data that I have. To blow up my business. And now here are a few suggestions from me. Again, this is, this was probably more in line with what we’re going to be doing over the next 90 days to get our business to grow. And what I’m suggesting here is that you’re more than welcome to rip them off and give it a crack yourself to make things really.

Go well for you. Here’s what we’re going to be doing. So at Owendenny Digital, we’re really focused on SEO at the minute. Now, the reason why we are focused on SEO is because we are a niche agency. We have a small lean and mean it’s like a tight knit team of 10. And our tight-knit team of 10, we can’t handle more than six enterprise clients at a time. Like where a small agency.

And.

If we focus on high quality SEO traffic, we will have more than enough inquiries. For us to field and also enable our business to grow. So by focusing on high transaction high commercial intent terms around SaaS marketing, Facebook ads management, Google ads, management, Google ads, agency, Melbourne, et cetera, et cetera.

Those high transaction high commercial intent terms are what we will focus on driving traffic to our website through organic means. If we can do that effectively, believe it or not, that’s going to result in massive growth for our business. So then what we need to do is think about the SEO publishing strategy that we have in place and seeing what is working and what’s not working. Why are we losing rankings? Why are we gaining rankings?

We need to do that effective evaluation at this time. The next thing that we’re going to be looking at Owendenny Digital is our remarketing campaigns. In fact, for just from remarketing alone, we spend at least a thousand dollars a month chasing you around the internet. So we get to see which ones of those campaigns worked.

Now, what’s really funny here with iOS 14.5. It’s sometimes very difficult to see what features are working when it comes to running your Facebook ads. See, I’ve had people reach out to me via the Facebook ads that they’ve seen, but they haven’t been catch captured as a conversion because they then converted through the chat section on our website.

Like how incredible is that guys? That’s so crazy. Like our HubSpot chat on our website is where a lot of our leads are coming from because we’re able to reply to them in real time. And sometimes people are simply not ready. To jump on and leave all their business details through the growth diagnostic or book, a friendly chat with me, but they would rather just low key, just type way. Hey, I want to grow my business. I need these services. Can you help me? Let’s go with it.

See, the funny thing is that’s not being tracked through our Facebook ads. And I don’t think you can with the HubSpot chat, if you can. I need to speak to my HubSpot specialists about that. But. What. I can then tell you, is that anecdotally, that Facebook remarketing campaign has worked and a likely client may come from that this month. So the cost to acquire that customer from a pay traffic perspective is a thousand dollars to potentially sell that person a really amazing website or get them involved with an amazing marketing solution to blow up their trades business or whatever it may be.

So again, that’s going to be a big focus of our next. Our next 90 days is to get those remarketing campaigns, the next thing we will be focusing on is our top of funnel campaigns to bring new. Pro. It’s problem aware people into our business. They may be solution aware people into our business that are within the software as a service niche, and we need to get them either nurtured or.

I find the people who are ready to buy and drive them to our website and get talking with them, to provide them with honest, brutal, no nonsense, direct response advertising advice to blow up their SaaS company. Now there’s going to be heaps of approaches. We can take from this. We can be thinking about LinkedIn, YouTube, or Facebook ads.

I’m a big believer in Facebook ads for SaaS companies and for any company in general. So again, we need to then evaluate over the next 90 days. How are we going to do this? Our last efforts haven’t been successful. So there are some of the things we’ll be looking at. Uh, Within the 90 days from a marketing perspective, but we can also do the same thing from a sales perspective.

Why have certain deals? Taken so long to close and some they’ve taken so little to close. What about What about the landing pages where people have come through from organic traffic, if we’ve got certain pages which are ranking well, which are two, then turning into inquiries. We know that our highest converting page on our website is our software as a service landing page, because that, again,

Drives high intent, SaaS companies wanting someone to help them with the growth marketing. So again, we’re going to be looking at these landing pages and ensuring that these are at the top of the search from an organic perspective to get us going forward. But now talking about those focused narrow sales changes that we can make to double our business.

Now. From, and this is this is a 100% transparent with our clients. Is that a lot of our services prices will be going up in the next three to 12 months. And. By increasing the price of your services and adding more value to our clients. We’re going to be increasing our, say our business revenue.

Not only will it grow our business and more money will come into the business. We’ll be able to provide a much better service to our clients and it’s going to be super exciting. To see this happen. So again Think about it. We’ve just analyzed marketing. We’ve analyzed where deals are coming from. We’ve analyzed landing pages. We’ve analyzed the, not the sales numbers. And we’re now talking about improving our products to increase our business and get it to double in the next 90 days.

We’re then going to think about, okay, cool. If these people aren’t ready, how do we nurture them? How do we get our email marketing more effective in the next 90 days? How do we commit to building a really amazing newsletter? How do we nurture that newsletter for the next 52 weeks? And absolutely blow it out of the water.

These are all the things you need to think about in your quarterly marketing review. But without over cooking the goose right here. Keep this whole thing. Simple. If you could only focus on one or two or three things over the next 90 days. This is what I can totally say is like the lowest cost. And not so much the lowest cost, the highest impact.

Three that you can focus on. Number one have one. Paid traffic source, which you will master in the next 90 days, whether it’s Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, Tik TOK ads. YouTube. I don’t care. One pay traffic source, master that in the next 90 days. We’re mastering Facebook. That’s that it’s happening. It is done.

Number two. One organic lead source. Now this organic lead source can be direct direct outreach. It can be cold email. It can be SEO master one. Outreach source and get it done. The next thing you need to think about though, if you want to talk about really improving your business growth.

Is then what’s one low. How do I say low intent brand building exercise that you can do on one platform to ensure that you are forever relevant in your space?

For us, we’re sticking to the podcast and we are sticking to the blog and then distribution of the blog and the podcast is going to be our perennial effort over the next. Nine to 12 months because we do believe that blowing up the blog and the podcast. We’ll be the fastest way for us to stay relevant. It will improve our SEO. It’ll do a whole lot of stuff, which is going to make it so much easier for us to crush it online with our direct response advertising strategies, and also stay relevant to software company, founders, CTOs, CMOs, and the works.

You know what I’m saying? So again, they’re going to be our three big focuses over the next nine to 12 months. But again, your next 90 days, Focus on one pay traffic source focus on one organic source. And then focus on one content piece. So you are forever perennially publishing to your target market. It’s just crucial. I know a lot of people, especially myself, I’m totally guilty of this.

Being one of those guys where it’s oh yeah, no, you don’t have to worry about it. I just run ads. It should be sweet.. Just acquire clients that way. Those days is now coming to an end because people want to check you out before they even click on an ad nowadays. In fact we see what’s the word we see so many people. Seeing our ads on Facebook, then jumping to the website instead of hitting the call to action button and inquiring on the website instead of touching the link. It’s crucial. You’ve got to get it right. And you need to be publishing and you need to be relevant.

And if it doesn’t smell right, it’s game over. Sorry. Ta-da. Toodles. Bye. Bye.

That’s what we’re going to be doing. We’re going to be analyzing our data from the last 90 days. Determining what’s really worked and then planning. And scaling those activities over the next 90 days. And I’m going to encourage you to do the same. Being the end of the quarter. I suggest you check out your CRM. If you don’t have one, hurry up and get HubSpot, hire us, or one of those data suites, which is totally the right way to go forward in your business.

Identify what traffic sources have led to results. What traffic has provided you with engaged people on your website, what traffic has involved in, what traffic has led to higher converting users on your website, our particular campaigns, mostly responsible. And why are they responsible? You need to dig into this.

Is it the angles? Is it the. Oh, goodness gracious me. Is it the creatives? Is it the offer? Get into why certain things have absolutely crushed it and just remember. Nine times out of 10, it’s your offer and what you provide. The next thing then you need to do is thinking about your sales data and seeing what has led to the massive and sustainable growth in your business. So is it the.

Is it the SEO campaign that you wrote as the remarketing campaign after people hit your website from your SEO campaign that rolled out, is that how you’re sending cold traffic to your website from LinkedIn or Google or Snapchat or whatever, or TikTok? I don’t care, but something. So then you’ve identified where the sales activity is starting and whereas a coming from.

How can you go about scaling that up and then optimizing your sales process from. You know the time to get people onto a call shortening your sales cycle. So deals close faster, increasing the average order value because you don’t have to just double everything in your business, because if you doubled the number of leads and doubled this, and you have the deal time and you double the AOV, that’s not like double, that’s not two X growth.

That’s six X growth. But if you’re just looking to double your business in the next. 90 days, all you need to do is get 20% or 20% more leads from your favorite lead source into the door. You need to have the amount of time. If not less. You probably only need reduce your your deal close time by 20%.

You then need to increase your average order value by 20%. And then all of a sudden, Hey, Presto. Yes. What you’ve doubled your business in 90 days. But that’s how simple it is. And it shouldn’t be any more complicated than that. In fact, if anyone tells you that needs to be more complicated than that, the fricking lying to you.

That’s it. It’s time to focus on your last 90 days of data. Go through this process with a fine tooth comb. But don’t overcook. The goose don’t complicate it. And then put some plans in action for the next 90 days. Starting with your traffic source with a bugger paid traffic source and organic traffic source. And then finally an organic oh.

An organic content play to ensure that you are forever and perennially relevant to your ideal customer profile. And that’ll help you blow up your SaaS business in 2023 in just 90 days. It’s Dean here from open source growth. I love you all. Thank you so much for tuning in, and if you need that support to figure out what happened in the last 90 days in your business. And you’re really looking for a growth marketing provider.

To deliver on its promises. Please hit us up in the show notes. So you can go about booking a friendly chat with me. Alternatively, we can uncover all the reasons why your business isn’t growing through completing a free growth diagnostic. It’s a free tool, which we enable all our business owners, all our SaaS founders, and all the listeners of this podcast to use.

All you need to do is click the link in the show notes, book, your free growth diagnostic, and we’ll get we’ll race into action to make. Make sure that we can tell you exactly why your business isn’t growing and how you can help make this happen. So again, if you want to do stuff with us, It’s all up to you. Otherwise you can always just tune into this podcast. It’s going to be perennially free. No crap about buying this no advertisements, nothing. It’s just, if you want some help.

You can always tap the link, but again, it’s forever free. Go about applying this stuff. I’ve dropped a lot of good shit in this podcast today. If you really want to succeed, this may be the podcast for you.

This is open-source growth. My name is Dean. Thank you so much for tuning in. I’ll see you when I see you. Bye.

—