The most common question we get asked while working with founders is, “What’s the best [insert campaign, channel, or other sales method] people are using right now?” It’s a common question because everyone is always on the lookout for ways to generate revenue faster.
While there are any number of tricks and growth hacks for customer acquisition, the truth is that most of these fail to meet the lofty expectations of their catchy titles. Why? The answer is simple. There are no quick fixes, silver bullets, or guaranteed shortcuts.
To successfully use any revenue generation plan, you first have to do the work to lay the foundation. More importantly, you have to do worthwhile work. Some activity is more valuable than other types of activity.
The worthwhile tasks will earn revenue faster than any shortcut, trendy campaign, or clickbait headline. As they say in the navy seals, “slow is smooth and smooth is fast.” The same is true for founders.
For those who want a reliable sales strategy you can return to over and over, here’s the not-so-secret secret – your best sales strategy for fast revenue is sitting right in your inbox.
If you capitalize on this simple inbox strategy, you could have a new wave of revenue rolling in faster than any expensive new sales hire or marketing campaign.
Revenue Generation Plan Step One: Know Who To Look For
The number one reason most customer acquisition shortcuts and growth hacks fail is because they lack the most important ingredient for success: a clear ideal customer profile (ICP).
That’s why step one to generate revenue is to know exactly who you’re looking for when seeking customers. Revenue is not about finding Mr. or Ms. Right. It’s about focusing on Mr. or Ms. Right Now!
Founders who find themselves seeking shortcuts for the fastest path to revenue often end up searching Google for quick tips that will magically bring a breakthrough. However, Google will offer thousands of answers, and all of them are shiny objects that will likely distract you from the actions that will truly lengthen your runway.
Avoid these Shiny Objects:
- The best email subject line
- The $5,000 monthly LinkedIn campaign
- Blindly copy this marketing tactic
- The chatbot that will win sales in the first five minutes
- Double your revenue by growth hacking
Before you pivot and jump into another new campaign, get clarity on your ideal customer profile. When you know who your customers are, their pain points, and how your solution helps then you significantly improve your chances of success with every go-to-market strategy.
The best way to start a revenue generation plan fast is to capitalize on what you already have. You have revenue in your inbox. To find it, you need clarity on your ICP.
Click here to get clarity on your ICP!
Step Two: Get Three Or More New Meetings Next Week
Everyone has emails they’ve ignored, didn’t follow-up on, or let sit too long. Your inbox is full of people you’ve already qualified. It’s packed with conversations you have already acquired – which by the way is the most costly and difficult part of any sales strategy.
While an old lead or contact in your inbox may have cooled off a bit, you’d be surprised how easy they are to reactivate. Make no mistake, it takes a lot less time and work to get them back on your radar than it does to start a conversation with a complete stranger who has never heard of you.
The best part is, you don’t need to do anything to acquire these contacts again. All you need to do is restart the conversation. You’ll be amazed at how responsive people are and how quickly your calendar fills up if you just reach out to the right people (your ICP) for the right reasons.
ICP Pro-Tips:
- Go into this exercise with the goal of getting three or more qualified meetings on your calendar this week.
- Plan on reaching out to these contacts 2-3 times over the next week or so.
- Remember, you can always go back through your inbox for another round of meetings, so focus on the lowest-hanging fruit first.
Find the right contacts
Go back three to six months in your inbox. Profile your contacts. If you know your ICP, then you know what you’re looking for when filtering for recent contacts to contact first.
Pay special attention to these categories.
- Find people who reached out to you, but you never followed up. Maybe you didn’t have time. Maybe you let it go because you felt bad about not getting back to them sooner. If they fit your profile, the reason you let them go doesn’t matter. Now is the time to rekindle that conversation.
- Look for someone you gave a demo to who seemed genuinely interested, but they never got back in touch. This person already has interest and plenty of information. Reactivate them with an update.
- Watch for people you didn’t engage with because they weren’t a fit for your ICP at the time, but now they are. As startups evolve, so does their ICP. That means your contact list could have plenty of untapped revenue. Recapture old contacts that fit your new ICP.
- Take note of the contacts you already reached out to because you know they are the right ICP fit, but you never heard back from them. You made the cardinal sin of taking no response for “no.” Stay top-of-mind and follow up more than once. Gentle persistence isn’t rude; it’s business. And it leads to revenue more often than you might think.
Get in touch the right way
This isn’t the time to add these people to an email campaign list. You didn’t go through all that effort profiling your ideal customer just to let them fade into a templatized, multi-step email cadence.
You’ve identified these people as worthy of real, dedicated, interpersonal communication. Now is the time to follow up directly.
Reach out to them. Send a brief, personal email to reintroduce yourself. Better yet, pick up the phone and call them.
The best way to make this communication effort worth both your time and theirs is to set a goal and maximize value.
Follow-Up Pro Tips:
- If you send an email, keep it brief. You’re reintroducing yourself, not reminding them of product features or talking at them about what you do.
- If you make a call, focus on listening. Learn about your contact – their interests, and their current pain points. Ensure they are still an ICP fit.
- Go into every communication attempt with a plan. Do you want them to reply? Then ask them to reply with an update for you. Do you want them on your calendar? Then invite them to a call.
- Follow-up with all of them. You never know what their day was like when they saw your email come in. They may have even missed it completely. Or they just didn’t have a moment to respond. Continue to let them know you’re there and you have a solution.
The idea is reconnect with warm leads and revive activity that may have been misidentified as dead, closed, or lost. So go in with a plan. Earn a relationship. And follow-up more than once.
Step Three: Repeat Three To Four Times Per Year
You now have a simple three-step sales strategy that earns revenue fast. Skip the conversations where you have to pay the price of admission (i.e., the cost of campaign development, contact sourcing, copywriting, and other expenses).
You have revenue sitting right there in your inbox. Those other activities take weeks to plan and implement. This simple inbox review can be done in a day and drive revenue to your business long before you would have launched any campaign.
As long as you have clarity on your ICP, you know who you’re reaching out to and why.
- Review your inbox.
- Have a goal in mind for what you want to get out of the conversation, and
- Get in touch.
You might email your contacts, but picking up the phone is even better. Either way, follow-up.
You can build a stronger, faster revenue generation plan that carries intent and more consistent outcomes by implementing this inbox sales strategy a few times a year rather than seeking hacks or shortcuts.