The 1960s-era framework of viewing the marketing process as a funnel is far out of date. The metaphor just doesn’t cut it in today’s world and it hasn’t for many years.

There’s a better system. It’s an effective set of concepts and tools that have been proven over a decade and confirmed by hundreds of B2B companies in industries from manufacturing, to professional services, to healthcare. It’s called The Revenue Tower^®, and it’s purpose-built to help high-growth organizations acquire more customers, retain and grow business with current customers and build a scalable marketing machine that enhances enterprise value.

The Revenue Tower helps ensure an integrated and comprehensive marketing and sales approach, and as resources are always limited, it helps businesses identify the highest-priority tactics, secure successes and create ongoing growth and expansion.

The Tower Metaphor

Being Chicago natives, we love skyscrapers. They’re not only beautiful, but a tower is an ideal metaphor for a strong B2B marketing system.

Consider your business revenue and profits in terms of a tower; by building a larger Revenue Tower, you grow your business. But the market is finite, and you have competitors all around you who want to expand their towers, too. Attracting people (customers) is the key to growth.

This Revenue Tower exists in a virtual world where prospective customers come in and out as quickly as they can load a web page. Once they become customers, however, they finally stick around, enjoying your rooftop garden. If they’re happy, they’ll tell others to come up, too.

As a marketer, it’s your job to continually attract these prospects back into your tower and push against gravity to elevate them up to the top. To be most effective, you have to make sure each level is addressed. Oftentimes, we find big imbalances, which mean that the marketing system is not optimized and investment is being wasted. For example, some B2B companies spend significantly on trade shows, but their lead follow-up is poor. A better balance could dramatically improve ROI. Or a company might be investing heavily in digital lead generation, but their brand message isn’t resonating with prospects, so their conversions are not as high as they could be.

Along with building out every level of your tower, you should ensure you’re prioritizing the smartest tactics at each step and applying creativity, digital science and solid execution throughout.

The Revenue Tower^® Deconstructed

Strategy

Walk by any skyscraper, and what’s out of your view is the giant foundation holding the entire thing up. In the Revenue Tower system, these are the things your prospects don’t see directly, but they’re the foundation of your marketing program, and they are critically important. These items include your target audiences and personas, product and service structure, value propositions, positioning, channel strategy and overall messaging. It also includes the internal communications plan and important elements, like core values and vision. It’s about identifying “why” you’re in business, making sure your employees are on the same page, communicating a consistent message and putting a good plan in place. The key at this level is market awareness and strategic vision. With a more solid foundation, you can build a bigger tower that creates more revenue.

Showroom

This is your first impression, your ground-floor-level digital and physical presence. It includes your graphic identity, your physical environment and your website. It also includes social media platforms, third-party endorsements and any other content you’ve distributed or made available for search engines to index. If a buyer comes across your company, they’ll get a quick impression at this stage. Based on what they see, they’ll either move right on by (forgetting you exist) or they’ll look a little further. The key here is credibility.

Initial Engagement

This is about lead capture. Some of the tactics at this level are things like search marketing, targeted ads, trade shows and direct prospecting. Actions might include downloading a white paper, signing up for a webinar, following your company on LinkedIn or setting up a demo. And remember, this isn’t a linear process; an individual could go right from initial engagement to a sales meeting or two years later they might send you a referral. The key here is to identify enticing offers or interesting propositions. These offers, packaged into attention-getting creative campaigns, should be created to drive action and start new relationships.

Ongoing Engagement

Nurturing a large number of relationships is more important than ever. Some buyers expect to see ongoing proof of your company’s leadership and value before they’ll contact you. In other situations, someone may be perfectly happy with their current supplier, but a year later, something changes, and now they’re looking for a new solution. Or maybe someone doesn’t have buying authority today, but down the road, they move to a new company and do. Tactics include special events, ongoing email communications, social media interaction and marketing automation campaigns. The key here is creating and sharing quality content on an ongoing basis to keep your company top-of-mind and build your brand image.

Sales Enablement

At this point, you’ve made contact with a qualified prospect and your sales team is working to uncover needs and turn them into a customer. Tactics here can include door openers to help get the meeting, sales presentations to enhance the communication of your value and benefits, and proposal tools to create better efficiency, quality and persuasiveness. The key is to create and share powerful insights demonstrating why the prospect needs your solution and why they need it now.

Customer Retention

The top floor is where your customers are. Now, they’re finally staying in your tower. You want to build them a comfortable rooftop garden where they’ll like to hang out, reinforcing to your other customers why you’re great and giving them the opportunity to tell all the people down below to come on up! Marketing to current customers is an area where many marketing organizations fall short but sometimes the biggest opportunity is in marketing to current clients—not only to increase loyalty, but also to expand the relationship and sell additional products and services. These tactics include creating ongoing reports demonstrating value and progress, creating customer events and educating and providing new insights. The key here is special treatment.

Four Performance Enhancing Elements

In addition to the levels, there are four performance-enhancing elements for a stronger Revenue Tower marketing system. These are:

1. A smart and effective content-generation program to make the tower more attractive and continually bring prospects back in.

2. Data visibility to create windows to see what’s happening in your marketplace with KPIs to measure and optimize the effectiveness of your marketing tactics.

3. Talent marketing to develop a more productive and effective staff.

4. A core MarTech & CRM stack to streamline sales and marketing operations, enhance customer experiences and drive data-driven decision making.

Let’s Build Success

The Revenue Tower is our proprietary tested method and it’s why Pepper Group has become the agency of choice for high-growth B2B companies. If you want to learn more about the Revenue Tower and how this integrated and strategic system can be applied to your business, contact us today!