how to scale new customers next year

Summary

every December I lock in a few hours and do a deep dive on customer acquisition data. last touch, all touchpoints, time from first contact to close. I pull most of it from HubSpot and I’m looking for what actually drove conversions, not what felt good.

then I run start, stop, keep.

1. stop. anything underperforming. ad sets, channels, content formats, partnerships. if the data says it’s not working, kill it before next year.

2. keep. what’s working stays and gets more budget. don’t break what’s compounding.

3. start. one or two new bets I want to test next year. they have to be ranked against what we’re stopping, not added on top.

the discipline is removing things to make room for new things. otherwise the team gets buried. then I bring the cleaned up plan into our annual planning meeting and we lock the direction for the year.

Transcript

introduction: insights into the end-of-year strategic review process

The most impactful business is the business that genuinely improves another human, a better human business. And to grow a business like this, you have to continually improve yourself. This podcast is a documentation of that thesis, scaling businesses and also personal growth. My goal is for you to shortcut this journey. So if you’re ready to try hard, subscribe. If you like what you’re hearing, please share and enjoy. All right, I’m going to dive right into this one and I’m talking about how I actually look at the end of the year.

So 2024 in this case, and then how I start to look at planning 2025. So really listen to this episode if you’re wondering, okay, where’s Jerred’s head at when it comes to scaling, to growth, to acquiring new customers. So this is the better human business podcast. I’m Jerred Moon, and I really want to let you behind the scenes here. So if you didn’t know my job, like my only job really is growth, like that’s it. There’s no set like responsibility other than kind of that thing.

And I’m not saying it all falls on me. Everyone in the company has a hand in this and their responsibility. But if I had to kind of summarize what I do, it’s growth. And as an entrepreneur, there’ve been many times where you’re wearing a lot of different hats, and I don’t wear a lot of hats anymore, I kind of just wear this one hat. And to be honest, the hats I’m wearing are fewer and fewer and smaller and smaller.

the critical role of data in expanding business and planning for the new year

And that’s exactly the direction I want to go. But I love creating things, and I love data, and I love growing business. So all of those things really combine in this to like a unique skill set for me and something that I love focusing on. So at the end of the year, what I do is like we just collect data all year. And sometimes we need to make a change in a quarter, maybe a month sometimes, depending on what it is.

But most of the time, we have a pretty good direction with marketing, with sales, with advertising. So I just kind of let things run, but I make sure I’m collecting all possible data. Some of this is automated collection through what HubSpot is able to pull. I’m specifically talking about HubSpot just because that’s what we use. And it can like map out customer journeys, actions people took, didn’t take. You can splice and dice data all sorts of different ways in HubSpot.

detailed analysis of customer data and how it influences our growth strategies

So I’m in there looking at things. We also have team members who track a ton of manual data. And the main reason it’s manual is just because we’ve done automated, we’ve done like trying to rely on all these different systems. There’s something that’s not quite right, something’s off. So I’d rather just a human be in charge of a lot of the data, especially if the data is really, really important to us making giant decisions. So we’re collecting all this data, just all year, it’s just like imagine it just funneling into this bucket.

And I will glance at it. I make sure that like we don’t have anything that’s like problematic, any issues, anything like that coming up. So long as things are kind of chugging along, I just kind of let that data be collected. But when I really do a super deep dive is in December, December at the end of the year, getting ready for the next year. And I’m just trying to tear apart, you know, what was the most successful thing that we did.

application of the start, stop, keep methodology in our strategic planning

And I don’t want you to get confused that we like I only look at December and then we have this plan and like that’s the plan for the full year. Like business is business, right? Like you get hit in the face, you’re going to have to adapt, change, overcome, make a quarterly plan, make an adjustment. All of those things are still happening. But I’m talking about these deep dives where I’ll spend hours and hours for multiple days looking at data.

I only do that once a year. And the main thing that I’m looking at when I’m doing this is customer acquisition. I want to know really two things. Well, I’ll take a list of all of our customers, right? All of the new customers from the year. And what I really want to know is what was the last thing that person did before they became a customer, which is last touch. It’s a marketing attribution. So what’s the last touch?

examples of what we’re stopping, keeping, and starting in our efforts to expand the business

And also what were their touch points? And so, and again, you can do this in a number of ways. HubSpot is the best way to do this. And I make no money from you going to HubSpot.com and signing up for that. I just really enjoy HubSpot and I use it. And so those are the two biggest things that we’re looking at is what pushed someone over the edge? And then what are all the things that they did before they became a customer?

You can see people clicking around on your website, clicking on different pages. Maybe they opened an email, consumed some content. And because it’s cool to hear like people always like spout off these like, oh, well, it takes 11 touch points across four different, you know, social mediums before someone becomes a customer. It’s like, that’s great. That’s something that Google put out and they like, you know, is an aggregate of 10 million different companies. Some of the companies are $70 million a month.

the significance of strategic agility in sustaining and expanding business growth

Some of them are $7,000 a month and they give you this like, boom, here’s this little like factoid. You can use it or not use it. So I’m sure you’ve heard stuff like that before. I hear it all the time. I don’t like it. Like it’s cool. Like all, all my only takeaway is like, okay, people need more than one interaction with you before they become a customer. But if you’re utilizing data, how are you utilizing it?

I want to know specifically in my business, not some generalized report. What’s the last thing that they have to do typically. And then also what are the other touch points involved? Like what, what kind of nurture sequences need to be built? What kind of interactions can we replicate for successful customers? All these kinds of things. That’s what I want to look at. And so that’s what we do. And we’re primarily using HubSpot. So if this is like a, you know what, dammit, maybe I should use HubSpot in 2025.

wrap-up: preparing for the upcoming annual planning meeting and setting the stage for 2025

Maybe that’s your biggest takeaway from what I’m talking about. But then I start to look at all of these different things. And then I’m asking myself three things, okay? What do I start doing? What do I stop doing? And what do I keep doing? So start, stop, keep, start, stop, keep. This is what I’m doing when I’m looking at data. So really any marketing initiatives, growth that you have, you can do the same thing. So I’ll start with stop.

What do we stop doing? There could be a number of ad campaigns, things that we ran, email marketing messages, whatever. It could just be all these different things ultimately. But if it’s in like the bottom percentage, like only 5% of our customers did these things, even if it’s an attribution to it led to a customer, we’re probably going to stop doing them. So we just kill the bottom, like we just like the lowest performers, we get rid of those.

It’s like, okay, we’re not sending those types of emails. We’re not doing those kinds of ad campaigns, whatever. Here are the things that we’re going to stop doing. And I make a list of those. Here are the things that we’re not going to do. It might be a type of campaign. It might be a specific way an email was written, a direct call to action versus, you know, more of a newsletter format. So there will be things that we stop doing.

Now the next thing is what do we keep doing? So what are you already doing? Like when I look at all this and I have been over the last couple of days and I found some really cool stuff, I’m going to share this in multiple podcasts to let you know like some of the things, like some of our biggest wins, success points and kind of what we did. But first I’m just kind of talking about the process.

So when I look at what do we keep doing, there’s going to be something that was successful. Maybe that’s email marketing. Maybe that’s your team reaching out to people. Maybe that’s Instagram content. You know, any of these types of things, you’re like, Hey, I am going to keep doing those things. I am going to keep doing these things and, and even not just like keep it at the same level, I’m going to try to scale it.

So it’s like, you know, 80% of my customers did this thing, X, Y, Z, read my newsletter or did whatever. So I’m going to keep doing those. Not only am I going to keep doing it, whatever the action is, I’m going to try scaling it. Okay. So I know what I’m stopping. And when you stop things, what does that do? That frees up bandwidth, either your bandwidth and time or your team’s bandwidth or time, but ultimately you have some things that you’re stopping.

So now you have some things that you can keep doing at a higher level. But my favorite part of stopping things is now you get to start things, but you don’t want to start things unless you’ve stopped something, right? Especially if your team is kind of maxed out. So what, what was successful? Where can we double down? And now where do we start? This is where we get into creation and it’s like, you know what? These specific things did really well this year.

Maybe it’s a marketing campaign, you know, maybe it’s a certain thing that a sales team member did a specific offer or whatever. And now you want to do more of that, but it’s not scaling it. It’s building new. So it’s like, this goes more for like category. So say you started advertising this year and it went well. So you like want to keep doing that. So you might run the same campaigns, but scale them up in dollar amount.

But what you would start doing is if that was a lead generation campaign, I’m going to start creating two new lead generation campaigns per month, something along those lines. Hopefully that’s making sense. So you’re going to start building new things in the same categories of what you’re going to keep doing. So hopefully I didn’t lose you. It’s like, I’m going to keep doing this exact marketing campaign because it’s working, but I’m going to start two new marketing campaigns like it because of that type of campaign that we’re already going to keep doing is working.

So how about we start some new ones? And this is where you get into testing. Not all of it’s going to work, but this kind of pushes you forward into 2025. So now you have what you are starting. You have what you are stopping and you have what you are keeping. And when you have all of those things, you are building quite the plan for 2025. And then it’s just maneuvering that it’s communicating these things to the team.

It’s also making sure that you stay on point again, making those adjustments quarterly or monthly, whatever’s required. But this is how we scale and we have scaled and grown year over year over year. It comes through data. It comes through data. We have to know so many data points and what’s crazy is I’m only talking about growth. That’s all I’m talking about because that’s what I’m responsible for. I’m responsible for growth. We do the same thing in sales, which I’m not responsible for.

We do the same things in our customer success, which I’m not responsible for. All these data points come together and we’re like, what do we start doing that’s similar? What do we keep doing that we already know is working and what do we stop doing because it doesn’t seem to be worth time, energy resources or whatever. And so that’s what we’re doing across all departments in the company. We actually have a big annual planning meeting that we do every single year, me and the business partners and we kind of put this plan together for the year.

And again, it’s more of an idea. It’s like this is the generalized approach for the year, what we’re going to work on, what we’re going to double down on, what we’re going to stop, what we’re going to start. That’s new. That’s the plan that comes out. We do that at the beginning of every single year, but we use the end of the year to slow down to look at data and to decide, Hey, here’s what was effective.

Now how can we do it even bigger and better in 2025? And I know one thing’s for sure. I’m going to have to try harder to continue this growth clip.