Gone are the days when the marketing budget and revenue aren’t measured closely. In today’s world, revenue is the standard by which every marketer stands by; and because it’s so important, our guest has put together a revenue how-to.
We speak with Cody Ward, Senior Director, Demand Generation Marketing at Conexiom, as he explains his 30 revenue rules and why they’re crucial to marketers.
Cody covers:
- Introducing the 30 revenue rules and why we need them
- Explaining the rules
- A key takeaway
Introducing the 30 revenue rules and why we need them
For Cody, even at the young age of 22, he knew he wanted to make a difference in the marketing industry — righting the wrongs that he saw by writing down a list of ideas on how to improve the space. And even though, thinking back, he didn’t have the context for a lot of the issues he saw in the space, listing out all the ideas drafted a map to becoming a CMO.
”Whenever this either rubs me the wrong way, or this is an experiment that fails and doesn’t work, or this is something that I would just do differently, I started putting into this bucket.” — Cody Ward
The guiding principle
For the modern marketer, revenue is the standard by which everything is measured. To help educate and guide those looking to follow in his footsteps, Cody shares his revenue rules not only for education but as a way to create an open dialogue to refine the rules.
Explaining the rules
It’s common to find a collection of marketing frameworks online. So, how are Cody’s rules any different — ease of use. Any framework will give an idea of workflow but no real, practical uses; especially no uses that can be implemented right away.
”I just want to give you something practical, that you can be like, ‘Alright, I’m going to inch towards that one,’” Cody explains.
These rules are meant to answer one of the three following issues in marketing:
- Justification: Marketers are often expected to show results immediately; and, if they don’t, the assumption is that it was a waste of investment. This facilitates an environment where marketers spend all their time defending their decisions rather than taking action.
- Change: A marketer’s day is not the same as it used to be — tactics and channels are changing. As such, they can no longer look to historical data to get an idea of what will work in the future.
- Optics: Many people assume that they understand marketing enough to do the role if they need to — despite this being very far from the truth.
Revenue rules
With the three problems in mind, we share a few of the 30 rules:
- Be a business strategist: It’s not enough to be just a marketer and have a clear lens of the business as a whole.
- Thinking long term: A marketer can get so caught up in how much revenue they can generate in the next five minutes that they forget to look at the next five years.
- Be accountable for the funnel: Taking responsibility for all the metrics of the business allows you to be more data guided.
- Report in the same format as finance: Aligning with your CFO helps create better analysis due to better conversation with your finance team.
- Ask for a budget: If you don’t ask, there’s no way for the CEO to give you a yes or no answer.
- Don’t justify with technology: More tools may not always be the answer. Look at your organization and have an honest conversation about whether you’re fully utilizing the tools you already have or not.
- Reduce friction to buy from your company: Eliminate any long processes it may take for a customer to buy a product.
- The enemy is perfection: Don’t waste time trying to make everything perfect; just make progress.
A key takeaway
Going over a few of Cody’s rules, it’s made clear that working simple, quick, small actions into the everyday can help substantially more than adhering to one of the multiple marketing frameworks. Ultimately, you’re setting yourself up to own the result in a way that regular marketing tactics could never accomplish.
”All of these ideas are define the path, defend the path, articulate the path, communicate the path, create your own GPS — that’s all focused on revenue.” — Cody Ward
Be sure to download the episode for the full list of Cody’s rules and check out these additional resources mentioned in the episode:
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