Dan Martell - October 22, 2018


How to Build a Revenue Growth Engine For Your Startup


Episode Stats


Length

8 minutes

Words per minute

192.93553

Word count

1,635

Sentence count

79


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, Dan Martell reviews the book "Extreme Revenue Growth" by Victor Chang. He breaks down the 5 key takeaways from the book and explains how you can apply them to your business to get the most out of your current strategy.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.200 Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor
00:00:02.620 and creator of SaaS Academy.
00:00:03.960 In this video, I'm gonna teach you the five key components
00:00:06.520 of extreme revenue growth and be sure to stay to the end
00:00:09.040 where I share with you how to get access
00:00:11.240 to my weekly sync format.
00:00:13.240 It's seven steps of running your weekly agenda
00:00:15.760 with your team to get them clear on outcomes,
00:00:18.000 understand the core metrics that they need
00:00:19.960 to be executing against and make sure
00:00:21.920 that everybody feels like they have a sense
00:00:23.380 of purpose in their work week.
00:00:30.000 Now I have read over a thousand business books
00:00:41.340 and all of the top books on business growth.
00:00:44.060 We're talking traction, scaling up, double, double, good to great.
00:00:47.440 You name it, I've read it.
00:00:48.940 I'm telling you, there's a sleeper book on the market
00:00:51.600 that you've probably never heard about.
00:00:53.480 I got it from my buddy Chandler Bolt as a recommendation.
00:00:56.340 I think it's self-published and I'm telling you
00:00:59.320 It's an incredible read.
00:01:00.820 It's called Extreme Revenue Growth by Victor Chang.
00:01:04.120 I've had the privilege of emailing him back and forth
00:01:06.820 about the book.
00:01:07.820 I liked it so much that I bought copies for all of my coaching
00:01:10.620 clients because I wanted them to get access to the information.
00:01:13.620 So what I'm going to do in this video,
00:01:15.420 I've never done a book review but in essence,
00:01:18.120 I'm going to deconstruct my five top takeaways and strategies
00:01:23.420 that I think you need to understand to get the most growth
00:01:26.520 in your business.
00:01:28.120 One, target a customer that's aware of his problem.
00:01:31.960 Now, one of my rules is you need to feed a starving crowd.
00:01:36.000 If you want to build an incredible business,
00:01:37.960 don't try to sell something to somebody
00:01:39.940 that doesn't have the problem.
00:01:40.900 I can't tell you how often I get founders
00:01:43.300 that see me doing social media stuff, YouTube stuff,
00:01:46.680 email automation stuff, business investing or whatever
00:01:49.180 and they're like, I've got this tool,
00:01:50.280 I'd love for you to use it.
00:01:51.580 Let me know and I'll reconfigure all your videos
00:01:53.580 or reconfigure your workflow and I'll do it for free.
00:01:56.080 I just want you to use my product
00:01:57.540 and I have to remind them that I don't have the problem.
00:02:00.680 You didn't even qualify me.
00:02:01.940 You didn't even ask if I needed a solution to that problem
00:02:05.980 and you just think because I don't want it,
00:02:07.920 I don't care, I don't think it's a good idea.
00:02:09.620 Look, at the end of the day, your job is to find the customers
00:02:14.500 that have the pain that you can solve.
00:02:17.560 If you're trying to sell something to a market
00:02:20.360 that doesn't have the problem,
00:02:22.040 you're gonna waste your time and you could, worse,
00:02:25.040 take it at a negative signal
00:02:26.960 that maybe there's no need for your solution
00:02:28.720 when there does exist one if you go look further.
00:02:32.440 So one of my overarching rules is
00:02:35.620 only help the people swimming towards you.
00:02:38.120 If they're not, totally cool.
00:02:39.620 Maybe later there'll be a need
00:02:40.980 and you can serve them then.
00:02:42.480 So that's number one.
00:02:43.820 Number two, promise your company makes.
00:02:47.200 Think about this.
00:02:48.480 If you want to differentiate yourself in the market,
00:02:51.140 you need to make a promise to the market.
00:02:53.820 You need to stand for something.
00:02:56.080 You need to say some kind of guarantee,
00:02:58.600 some kind of promise, some kind of thing
00:03:00.920 that makes you stand out from everybody else, right?
00:03:03.320 And this is not only a driver for external communication,
00:03:05.960 but this is a driver for the internal communication
00:03:08.840 with your team to get them excited.
00:03:10.440 So maybe it's your guarantee.
00:03:12.840 Maybe it's the way that you focus
00:03:15.500 on your product interface design.
00:03:16.940 Maybe it's the experience that you deliver your customer
00:03:19.420 through customer success.
00:03:20.740 Whatever it is, you gotta ask yourself,
00:03:22.420 what is the promise we make to our market
00:03:25.820 that we stand by, that's differentiated,
00:03:27.860 that's powerful enough to get people to sit up and listen.
00:03:31.060 Number three, distribution channels.
00:03:33.140 Now, when I think about companies that have scaled fast,
00:03:35.960 have gone to market, have built top line revenue very fast,
00:03:39.140 I think of BioTrust in Austin.
00:03:41.140 They went to market, I believe,
00:03:42.700 hit 100 million in revenue within three or four years.
00:03:45.740 Maybe that number's even higher.
00:03:47.420 But one of the key ways they did that
00:03:49.380 is finding distribution partners, affiliates,
00:03:51.940 joint ventures with people that had access to the market
00:03:55.620 and they had a really incredible product, right?
00:03:58.480 So because they could fulfill on a promise
00:04:00.880 that they made on number two,
00:04:02.080 the second thing I told you about extreme revenue growth,
00:04:04.420 they were able to attract those partners to promote for them.
00:04:07.520 So that's one angle but you gotta ask yourself
00:04:09.500 what is your distribution channel for reaching your customers?
00:04:12.500 The other one is transactional.
00:04:14.320 This is looking at your business direct to consumer,
00:04:17.540 direct to the business and asking yourself
00:04:19.360 how are you gonna build that out?
00:04:20.340 Now I'll tell you, going the distribution route
00:04:22.680 through partners is cheaper in the short term
00:04:25.340 because they subsidize the cost to acquire a customer.
00:04:28.380 If I build that channel direct, then I need to figure out
00:04:31.620 how am I gonna pay for the ad spend, the creative,
00:04:35.220 the tests that need to be run and I gotta figure out
00:04:38.000 the strategies to do it if I've never done it before
00:04:40.160 to get in front of that customer.
00:04:41.200 Now that is an incredibly powerful thing to build
00:04:44.600 but the other one could be faster and more cost effective
00:04:47.800 but figuring out your distribution channels
00:04:49.740 is extremely important to build revenue growth.
00:04:52.540 Four, product that fulfills a promise.
00:04:55.440 Now, I already said that you need to make a promise
00:04:57.720 to the market, that's number one.
00:04:59.420 But two is you gotta deliver on that promise.
00:05:01.520 I always tell the clients I work with
00:05:03.060 that your marketing site has kind of a product token,
00:05:06.220 a product promise.
00:05:07.260 Your job from a product point of view,
00:05:09.120 if you can convince them on the marketing site
00:05:11.120 to engage with your product,
00:05:12.500 to sign up for a free trial or schedule a demo,
00:05:14.800 your job on a product level,
00:05:17.160 and customer success involved in that,
00:05:19.000 is to make sure that you deliver on that promise.
00:05:21.640 The worst thing you could possibly do
00:05:24.980 is have incredible distribution, incredible marketing,
00:05:29.360 only to have a product that falls short.
00:05:31.600 And it's number four in regards
00:05:33.720 to the flow of extreme revenue growth,
00:05:35.840 but it is probably the most important.
00:05:37.900 In the Valley, in San Francisco,
00:05:39.320 they call it product market fit.
00:05:41.780 And I like the idea that Victor puts out
00:05:44.100 that argues for the fact that it's really just about
00:05:47.460 fulfilling that promise and making sure that our product
00:05:50.260 delivers on what we said we could do for the market
00:05:52.700 because in doing that, that's where we increase
00:05:55.160 what I call VWAM, viral word of mouth,
00:05:57.740 marketing for your solution.
00:05:59.800 So you can still have distribution and transaction,
00:06:01.700 marketing, but if you have a product that fills on a promise,
00:06:04.240 you also get the amplification aspect of people
00:06:07.480 referring other customers to you.
00:06:09.240 Number five, sustainable competitive advantage.
00:06:12.360 Now, if you're building a business,
00:06:13.860 you wanna create a moat around you.
00:06:15.720 You don't want to make it so easy for somebody to just come
00:06:18.300 into the market and copy you and start building a business that
00:06:22.260 looks exactly like you.
00:06:23.480 So you want to create this competitive advantage.
00:06:25.480 And in the book, Victor argues for two different types.
00:06:27.860 One is a physical one.
00:06:29.240 And this could be physical in the sense of the size of a sales
00:06:32.320 team, it could be the distribution logistics systems
00:06:36.620 you built, I'm thinking Amazon.
00:06:38.240 If you didn't know, like Amazon has built this logistics
00:06:42.040 platform that is ridiculously expensive to build out and is
00:06:44.880 extremely competitive as an advantage and it's really,
00:06:48.680 so that's the physical side.
00:06:49.880 So like physical things, maybe offices in little cities all
00:06:53.720 throughout like a network of building that out.
00:06:55.480 I have a friend, he's got a hearing company,
00:06:57.400 he's done that in his market where he's got offices in all
00:07:01.060 these cities that for most people wouldn't be cost effective
00:07:03.440 but he figured out how to do it.
00:07:04.600 That is a competitive sustainable advantage on the
00:07:07.100 physical side.
00:07:08.060 On the other side, it's intangible.
00:07:09.800 So if you think of intangible, these are things like brand
00:07:12.280 reputation, key patents, exclusive partnership and
00:07:16.960 distribution deals.
00:07:18.320 If you can figure out how to do that then that's gonna allow
00:07:20.960 you to be competitive over the long term.
00:07:22.760 Too many businesses get little spurts of growth but they don't
00:07:27.020 continue past year three, four and five because they haven't
00:07:30.300 done enough work on that area.
00:07:32.300 So quick review, number one key component of extreme revenue
00:07:35.940 growth is target customer aware of his problem.
00:07:39.380 Number two is promise your company makes.
00:07:42.040 Number three is distribution channel.
00:07:44.860 Number four is product that fulfills a promise.
00:07:48.120 And five is sustainable competitive advantage.
00:07:51.460 As I mentioned at the beginning of the video,
00:07:52.660 I want to share with you the Weekly Sync format to allow you
00:07:55.440 to have incredibly productive meetings,
00:07:57.480 get everybody focused on the right goals in your business
00:08:00.220 and also allow them to surface challenges that you need to know
00:08:03.640 about so you can overcome them.
00:08:05.280 You can click the link below in the description to download
00:08:08.080 your copy and if you like this video,
00:08:09.580 be sure to click the like button, subscribe to my channel
00:08:13.020 and share this video with somebody you care about
00:08:15.060 that you think it could serve.
00:08:16.720 As per usual, I wanna challenge you to live a bigger business
00:08:19.260 and a bigger life and I'll see you next Monday.
00:08:26.100 Product that fulfills on the promise.