Add $25K MRR Monthly: My Complete Growth Framework
Learn the exact process I use to help IT companies scale their monthly recurring revenue
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Welcome to Repeatable Revenue, hosted by strategic growth advisor , Ray J. Green.
About Ray:
→ Former Managing Director of National Small & Midsize Business at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, where he doubled revenue per sale in fundraising, led the first increase in SMB membership, co-built a national Mid-Market sales channel, and more.
→ Former CEO operator for several investor groups where he led turnarounds of recently acquired small businesses.
→ Current founder of MSP Sales Partners, where we currently help IT companies scale sales: www.MSPSalesPartners.com
→ Current Sales & Sales Management Expert in Residence at the world’s largest IT business mastermind.
→ Current Managing Partner of Repeatable Revenue Ventures, where we scale B2B companies we have equity in: www.RayJGreen.com
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Transcript
Speaker 1
You're an IT business owner, you want to add 25,000 a month, a new MRI every single month. But what you're doing right now isn't working necessarily. You're not quite sure what you need to change or what you need to focus on in order to get there, in order to move the needle and get to that point. Do you need more leads or do you need better leads?
::Speaker 1
Do you need to improve the sales process so you're not sure where in the whole system that you need to to really focus on? What I want to do is walk you through how I would approach this, like my thought process, and work it all the way backwards, as if you had hired me as your CEO or your your chief revenue officer and said, we need to get to this goal.
::Speaker 1
Can you help us identify where our system is breaking down right now, what we need to focus on and how we prioritize the initiatives and the projects, the things that we've got to work on to get there. I'm going to walk you through my entire process and how I work that backwards to identify what are the core problems or the bottlenecks that are keeping us from getting there, and how do we attack them?
::Speaker 1
Like how do we go after each one of them and in what order? So let's get started. Hey what's up? I'm Ray green, former managing director of the US Chamber of Commerce and CEO for investor groups and now a business owner myself. I'm the founder of Mssp Sales Partners, and we help IT companies scale their sales. Now, what I'm going to do is just literally walk you through this process of saying, we need to hit or add this amount of new MRI every single month.
::Speaker 1
How do we break that down into achievable goals? How do I identify where in our process we need to focus in order to get there? So you can apply this to your business? Okay. Now I'm going to do this on a whiteboard. That's just kind of thinking out loud on a on a whiteboard. Is this just a little bit easier for me?
::Speaker 1
I do have a worksheet like I have something a guide that walks you through each of these steps. So if you want something that's a little bit cleaner and easier to follow, just go ahead and click the link that's either in this video or in the description, and you'll get access to the Chief Growth Officer scorecard. Right. And that's the process that we're actually going to walk through.
::Speaker 1
And you can fill in the data in the information as you go. It's entirely free. Just plug in your email. You get access to it with a bunch of other stuff because you'll get access to like the whole sales toolbox, but not the point here. So click on that if you want to get access to the worksheet. Otherwise, you can watch me work through this process and I'm zeroed out.
::Speaker 1
By the end of this, you're going to know how to apply this to your business. All right so let's jump in here. So the first thing we want to do is we want to get really clear around what the goal is, what I'm going to do for the sake of this video is I'm just going to I'm going to name a goal.
::Speaker 1
I'm going to say we want 25,000 a month, a new MRI added every single month. Like that's the that's the target. Okay. Now you can plug in your goal. Maybe that's low, maybe that's high. But the the process itself is going to be the same. So we're going to say that's 25,000 a month in MRI. And now we have a target.
::Speaker 1
We have something to optimize for. Because the reason this is really important I know the clarity of goals is important just for like common sense. But the strategy to get a 10% improvement and to get a ten x improvement is fundamentally different. And by the way, there's not a right or wrong, but you've got to know what the specific goal is.
::Speaker 1
The next thing we need to do is we need to say how many sales a month does that mean for us right now, if I'm going to look at this whole growth system, all the marketing, the sales and what's driving are our results, what we have today, I want to know, in order to get 25,000 a month, what does that mean in terms of quantity, in terms of volume.
::Speaker 1
So in our case let's say it's: ::Speaker 1
Okay. We need ten closed sales per month at this average to hit this target. Now I've got a number or a sense of the volume that we want. Okay. Now the theme here is peeling the onion, working this entire process back into understanding where are the gaps today and where do we need to focus, and what are the levers we need to pull.
::Speaker 1
So we just keep working this process backwards so we need ten deals. Now I'm going to look at this and say what are the main stages of our sales process. And for the sake of this exercise, what we'll say is we go to proposal. You know, it's actually much harder than you think to, to spell while you're talking, proposal.
::Speaker 1
And then we've got to discovery. Let's assume this process is really straightforward. It's it's a discovery call 630 60 minute discovery call that then leads to a proposal that then leads to a close client. And you may have an assessment in here. You may have a qualifying call in here. You may have other pieces. If you do just plug them in because the same concept, the same premise is going to apply regardless of what your stages are.
::Speaker 1
Now. It helps if you have data at each of those stages, right? It doesn't help to add eight stages here. If you don't have any data on what those conversion rates are going to be. So if you're in doubt, keep it really simple and estimate where you need to go. Right. So we're going to do proposal and discovery.
::Speaker 1
And the reason this is important is we say we need ten deals a month. What I want to know is what's the proposal to close ratio okay. So how many proposals do I need to give to get ten clients. In other words, out of the number of proposals that I give, how many become converted paid clients going forward?
::Speaker 1
And let's say here it's 50% you've got a 50% conversion rate or close rate at this at this stage. And what you do is you just divide ten here by 50% because you need to deliver more proposals than you are going to get deals. And right now it's 2 to 1 okay. So we're going to take ten divided by 50%.
::Speaker 1
proposals ten proposal: ::Speaker 1
How many go on to proposal. Now depending on where you're getting your leads today and what your volume is, you may look at me and say right, it's it's 100%. Well, if you only have one lead a month, that may be the case. And it's a referral from somebody that's already pre-sold these numbers tend to change based on what your process is and where your lead source is and how much volume you have.
::Speaker 1
But you want to be practical about this. Like you want to be really realistic and say, okay, if we're only getting one deal a month in order to hit these numbers, what's the ratio going to look like? There will be falloff. As you grow a business. There's inevitably there's going to be some fallout for these ratios. So let's assume here at the discovery stage it's 50% to okay.
::Speaker 1
So 50% of the people that we sit and run a discovery call with go on to proposal. And and 50% of them go on to become a paid client. All right. So let's do the same thing here. We're going to take 20. And we're to divide it by the 50%. That's going to give us 40. We need 40 SAT discoveries.
::Speaker 1
So step backwards one more level. What's your show rate on your discoveries. Is it 90%. Is it 40%? If it's 40%, it's probably it's probably a high leverage point. We'll talk about that here in just a little bit. But what is the ratio of people that book a discovery that actually show up. And again, depending on your process and depending on your volume and depending on your lead sources, this is going to vary significantly.
::Speaker 1
If you're running paid ad, it's going to be, you know, soap to a cold audience. You may see a lot lower of a show rate if you're, you know, basically relying on organic content or referrals, you're going to see significantly higher show rates, but almost never is at 100% like even if it's organic and referral with low volume, there's still your reschedule.
::Speaker 1
There's still a something that happens. For our example, what we're going to say is we're going to say we've got an 85% show rate. So 85% of the people that book a discovery call actually set that discovery call. So again, one more time we're going to take this 40. We're in a divided by 85. Now we've got 47.
::Speaker 1
We need 47 booked discoveries per month in order to hit our 40. So we're getting a sense of the volume that's necessary to actually make this happen. And this allows you to put together a battle plan, right. If you say, all right, these are the numbers that I need. Now, how am I going to do that? Now, one more question you may have is what do we need in terms of volume to get 47 booked calls a month?
::Speaker 1
Okay. Well what's your lead conversion rate? In other words, what percentage of the leads that come into your ecosystem that come into your CRM, that come in from your marketing campaigns and everything else? What percentage of those actually book a discovery? Call that number is going to vary again, significantly, I would say, just for, you know, for for our purposes here, we'll say 10%, 10% of the leads that come in every month actually go on a book call.
::Speaker 1
Now, if you're not sure where to look for this, go back into your CRM. Pull you know, number of new leads over the past six months, like just take the take the total number of new leads and then go in and get your your booked calls over the same period of time. And you'll find an estimate. You know, you can get something there that you that you can use to to plug in here.
::Speaker 1
If we have a 10% conversion rate and we need 47 calls, then we need 47 divided by 10%. We need 470 leads per month. For all of this to happen. Some people may look at that. Holy shit, how is that ever going to happen? Other people may look at this and go, okay, we know exactly how that's going to happen.
::Speaker 1
Like we run, you know, we have a repeatable mechanism to to drive leads. We just need to pull the lever harder or something like that. But, you know, have a sense of what kind of volume you need and what kind of activities you need. And what you're going to need to see from your team in order to hit the numbers that you've got.
::Speaker 1
And you can just plug in different numbers. Okay. Now what we're going to do here, okay. This is what we need. Where are we at now. Right. Like I want to understand where are we at now compared to what we need. And the best way to do this is to take these same metrics. I've actually already pre-written this because I wanted to save you the anguish of having me write this all out and try to make it legible.
::Speaker 1
But we've got basically a chart now in the sheet that I have in the, in the toolbox, like that, you can get access to it has all this done. So you can just plug it in. But here you see what we just went through. We need 470 leads at a 10% conversion rate to get 47 discoveries booked, 85% of which are going to show up, which give us 40 discovery sap.
::Speaker 1
clients at an average MRA of: ::Speaker 1
You may have to estimate some of this. And if you have to estimate that's fine. But you want to plug in your actual numbers here. What I want to look at when I'm looking at this chart is I want to identify where are the areas of the largest and most important deltas. Right. Like you may look at some of these and you're like, oh hey, we are actually crushing this number and this number and this number and this number, but we are not at all hitting this number and this number and this number and this number.
::Speaker 1
But you really want to understand where are the gaps, okay. From what we need and where we're at. And I you start building your plan to actually achieve this because you understand these are the things that need to happen. These are the things that are happening. And here's the delta. All right. Between these things now you may look at this chart.
::Speaker 1
You may say, okay I've got some green I've got some red. Now what. Like what do I, what do I do first. Do I try to do all of this at the same time? You don't like, you don't want to try to attack all of these things at the same time is impossible, no matter how large the organization.
::Speaker 1
If you try to attack all of these initiatives and all these KPIs and all the gaps in the deltas that you have in your process, it's never going to work effectively. What you want to do is you want to look at it and you want to say, all right, where are the biggest gaps? If I have a 30% show rate?
::Speaker 1
And what I've plugged in here is that we need an 85% show rate to get to the goals that we want. That's a huge gap, but that may actually represent really low hanging fruit. That may mean that you're just completely not doing something effectively in that area. And some small tweaks may make big gains. All right. So I'm going to look at what are the biggest gaps.
::Speaker 1
Are there areas that have ripple effects okay. In other words if I go fix something here does it then also have ripple effects all the way down? If I ten x the number of leads will shit, that's probably going to flow all the way down. So where are these areas in the process that have ripple effects. So that's another thing that I look at.
::Speaker 1
I'm also looking at. Are there some things that are incredibly hard long term projects versus easy wins? Okay. So look at the amount of effort that's required in addressing each of these gaps. One area may be the highest gain. It may be the heaviest lift and it may require the most work. And it may have the most long term impacts on two years from now.
::Speaker 1
Maybe that's phenomenal, but right now it's not going to necessarily drive cash. But if I address this thing here, we could get this done in a couple of weeks and it's going to have an immediate effect. So I'm going to look at that as well. Now, a really simple framework to approach this is start upstream. And this isn't it's not universal, but it is.
::Speaker 1
If you add 20 most of the sales turnarounds that we've done, you're gonna look upstream first. It doesn't really help me to double your closed rate. If you only have two sales calls a month. But the problem at that point probably is is something upstream. I need to fix something upstream in order to have the opportunity to fix things down here.
::Speaker 1
Okay, so it doesn't make sense trying to fix things at the bottom of the process if there's nothing coming in to the top of the process. So start with upstream metrics, then move downstream really systematically, like look at that process and say, hey, we're getting a ton of leads. They're not booking calls. All right. Boom. Let's let's focus on that for a period time.
::Speaker 1
How do we change that number. How do we get better results from this conversion piece. Then we've got people that are booking calls where show rate now sucks. So start upstream and then move downstream systematically. Look for things that have exponential gains meaning hey you know what? If I fix that one thing, it's actually going to make everything else in the business easier.
::Speaker 1
So that's how I would prioritize. Where do I need to focus? Okay. Then the next question you may have is how do I do it? And a really simple framework that I use when I'm looking at how we going to address the gaps that we've got, like, how am I going to to prioritize these things even when I know the area of the business that we need to focus on most?
::Speaker 1
Is Alex Formosa framework on this is perfect. It's more better new, right? In other words, what is what can you do more of. Right. Because you're already doing it in terms of that solution, getting your results. You've already got the thing in motion. You've already got some learning. You've already paid down what's what's called ignorance debt. Like when you're starting new initiatives and shit like that, you're already doing it.
::Speaker 1
So can you do more of it? Like if you're doing something that generates you 200 leads a month right now and you need to get to 470 like we've got, can you simply just two and a half what you're doing on the marketing side that's already working and just drive more volume at the top? It's usually the fastest, easiest route to moving the needle, right.
::Speaker 1
So you start with what can we do more of? Then you say, what can we do better, right. Like we're already doing it, but can we make it better? Can we make improvement right. Like we're doing outbound email and campaigns and calling? Can we get better scripts? Can we write better copy? Could we improve the the landing page?
::Speaker 1
You know, the the conversion of CRO, of the conversion, other things in the process that we can start to tinker, iterate and optimize so that collectively we start seeing bigger results. Right. So what can we do more? What can we do better then last. Absolutely. Last. Do you look at what are the new initiatives that we should do?
::Speaker 1
And I think this is really important because when we go through this process and we identify, hey, the core KPIs, we identify the core gaps, we prioritize what the strategic initiatives need to be. A lot of people then immediately think, oh, shoot, we should do let's start paying ads, or let's go hire a salesperson, or let's go do like something that they're not doing right now.
::Speaker 1
And again, going back to like, more and better and then new. Like when you start new initiatives, it is always harder, it always takes longer, and it's always more expensive than you think it's going to be. I have learned this lesson so many times, like it's in my in my own business, in the like, through companies. I was turning around, they through like being at the at the chamber I've learned is I'm, I'm optimistic.
::Speaker 1
Like I'm, I'm like, it's why I'm an entrepreneur. I have to be optimistic in order to, to do this to myself, basically. So like I always think, oh, you know what? Like we could try that and yeah, we'll kick ass. That optimism is great. Like it keeps us going, keeps moving forward. But it also means we start shit and we don't always think through.
::Speaker 1
Can you really get results that quickly? Is it really going to cost that much? Do you know what's behind that curtain like it looks like let's just go start paid ads. Okay. Then we've got to learn this. Then we've got one this, and then we've got to understand, we've got to test this and we've got to do creative.
::Speaker 1
Then we've got to change up. So we've got to tweak this, then we've got to mess with the audiences, then we've got to start retargeting, then we've got but like, oh shit. And it gets harder. That's why I say new initiatives put those last. That is typically not a high leverage, fast activity that's going to get you where you need to be.
::Speaker 1
But for the most part, again,: ::Speaker 1
You know, the worksheet that we, that we have. So if you're looking for some ideas and you know, hey, you know, this converting from discovery to proposal is a problem of ours. We've got a few like really common solutions that you can plug in for each of those stages. So feel free to steal those from from that. But after you've gone through this process, you have some really important information like this is a this is a really important like strategic document that says this is our growth plan.
::Speaker 1
This is what we need to do and focus on to get where we want to be. If you've gone through the process of doing this, you've got even a rough drafts with some actual numbers, or estimates, and you want some help taking a look at that and prioritizing and saying like, hey, this is what I was thinking.
::Speaker 1
Like, based on what you said, you know, what would this be where you started? Feel free to hop on a call with me or my team. It's we've got a 15 minute call. It's not a sales call like you can you can leave your credit card at home. We won't even pitch anything. Feel free to bring this to us, though, and we'll have a quick introductory conversation here.
::Speaker 1
What your goals are kind of look at this and give you some suggestions based on, you know, our experience and what we see the link to do that's in the description, I'm sure you know, somewhere in the, the profile and all that stuff as well. So feel free to do that or just take this and put it to use like implement it, you know, go plug it into to the team and, you know, get some feedback.
::Speaker 1
But if you've actually done this, if you've done the actual work here and plugged in these numbers, it will give you the insight that you need to say, I need to hit that target. I now need to work this piece backwards, peel this onion to understand what needs to happen. Okay? And then like from there, I'm going to focus on the areas that are going to have the highest opportunities for improvement.
::Speaker 1
And I'm going to prioritize those based on more better new and initiatives. And by doing that you're well, well on your way to to hitting your goals. So I hope this has been helpful. If it has, feel free to subscribe to the channel or, my email newsletter we send out, you know, free stuff every week. And until next time, adios.
