ICYMI: A recap of Q2 at The Revenue Architect

Fractional CRO highlights and top posts

It’s been another exciting 3 months for me :)

• Kicked off engagements with 3 fantastic clients in my fractional CRO business and am proud to share some of the initial impact below.

• Published another six practical how-to guides for solving early-stage GTM problems, expanding my archive to over 150. Round up below.

• Kicked off my new series of online video lessons exclusively for subscribers.

• The Revenue Architect turned 3 years old!

Fractional CRO client highlights

I took on 3 fantastic new clients this quarter. Here’s a quick look at what they do and what we’ve been able to accomplish so far:

• A performance marketing agency who I’ve helped win 3 new B2B clients in the first two months of our engagement. The key to our success has been arming the founder with a framework to diagnose and troubleshoot our pipeline, simplifying the pitch to focus on impact over features, practicing the right questions to ask on calls, reviewing his calls async and using our weekly working sessions to create a feedback and accountability loop.

• A pre-seed AI startup who I’ve helped grow from pre-revenue to $300k ARR in 3 months. They have very strong founder-market fit so the key to our success has been refining our ICP to identify qualified prospects, standing up a self-serve motion to get individual users to first value and payment quickly, building a sales-led motion to support multi-user deals and reviewing calls async to improve the founder’s discovery and proposal skills.

• A seed stage proptech software startup who I’m helping develop an upsell motion. The product delivers incredible ROI but the team has struggled to get their cost-conscious customers to view them as a revenue driver instead of a software expense. We’re rebuilding the pitch to lead with competitive insights and benchmarks from their usage data that get customers to quickly see the value they are delivering and the potential to grab more value by adopting more products.

If you’re interested in learning more about my fractional CRO offering, please get in touch at arnie@therevenuearchitect.com.

New how-to guides

• How to overcome the “you guys are too small” objection

  • Every early-stage startup runs into this problem, especially when you are competing with incumbent BigCos who have brand recognition.

  • The secret is to reframe the buyer-seller dynamic, so that the buyer goes from being afraid of doing business with you to being afraid of missing out on the opportunity of doing business with you.

• How to prompt buying signals out of your prospects

  • The traditional process of qualifying your buyer by asking open-ended questions about their problems and probing for severity and urgency to build momentum is fine. It’s just slow and unpredictable.

  • The short cut is to use competitive insights that show your buyer you already know what their top problem is and that you have a track record of solving it. This prompts your buyer to start asking you why, how and how much.

• How to use AI to improve your homepage messaging

  • Generative AI is both a threat and and opportunity for marketers. On one hand Google’s AI results are taking traffic away from blogs. On the other hand, chatGPT makes it easier than ever to improve your messaging and conversion.

  • This issue steps you through how to use chatGPT to summarize your customer reviews and use them to create new variants of homepage headlines and subheadings.

• Tearing down cold email openers

  • Salespeople routinely fluff their opening lines with out-of-context small talk, generic observations, bland questions and feature dumps.

  • I’ve taken 7 of the worst email openers and rewritten them to be more engaging and thus more likely to generate a response from the reader.

• Answering your questions about sales hiring

  • A round up of the top questions that early-stage founders ask about sales hiring. Who to hire, when to hire them, what to look for, what results to expect, when to add a second and a third etc..

• How to simplify enterprise sales

  • The reality of enterprise sales is that it gets complicated very quickly. Legions of stakeholders, incumbent vendors and endless legal, procurement and security hurdles. It can easily become a huge distraction and a drain on resources. I’ve laid out 6 techniques you can use to simplify your enterprise sales process and make it more predictable.

New video lessons

• How to write emails that your prospects will respond to (16 minute lesson)

• How to set up a warm outreach motion (15 minute lesson)

If you haven’t already done so, please subscribe!