Alex Boyd

RevenueZen

RevenueZen is a B2B SEO and content marketing agency. We'll drive demand and lead gen for your company. You must:

1. Have at least one strong marketer on your team or division that we'll be working with
2. Be a SaaS brand or B2B Services company (we don't do e-commerce)
3. Understand your ICP and who you want to target
4. Be comfortable with a higher content production velocity than you may be used to

We look forward to hearing from you: https://revenuezen.com

Founder

Aware

Grow your LinkedIn audience and revenue insanely fast.

Co-Founder

Paramark.com

Advisor

Juno

Angel Investor

Hiline

Proud to have supported Hiline as a strategic advisor as well as through RevenueZen as their growth agency partner. We helped build and implement strategy for Performance SEO, executive LinkedIn branding, RevOps, prospecting, sales recruiting and training, and marketing enablement. The company grew ARR dramatically and successfully exited to Red Iron Group in the Fall of 2023.

Strategic Advisor & Investor (Exited to Private Equity)

Modern Sales Pros

Modern Sales Pros is the world's largest community for leaders in sales, operations, enablement and related disciplines. Our mission is to help our community learn how to solve the biggest challenges they face (and would otherwise bang their head against the wall trying to solve). Our 13,000 members learn from each other through our online message board and through amazing in-person events.

MVP Member

inDinero

I drove growth through an obsession with metrics, ruthlessly obliterated the existing high churn that was related to sales' expectation-setting, and turned what seemed like big sales ops problems into simple solutions.  Turned around a struggling SDR team, and played the ukelele in the office to my coworkers' dismay (delight?). Reported with joy to the great Jessica Mah.

$5M in new business from the team I built in 2016.  100% y/y growth. Located in Portland, OR.  Hired & led a team of 10+ AEs distributed across SF/NY/PDX, and 8+ SDRs based in PDX.

Director of Growth

Closed $1.3M in new SMB business through personal sales efforts, dramatically exceeding quota. I found business through a combination of deep partner relationships, outbound prospecting, and a mastery of discovery and education. My sales style was very focused on product knowledge. I helped founders grow and networked with the coolest, hungriest startups I could find.

Sr. Account Executive

FXCM

Built up and managed a significant book of deep client relationships; was responsible for both new business and revenue retention.

Mentored other brokers in multiple departments, frequently tutored junior reps and presented my techniques as well as investment ideas in company-wide sales meetings, to help others learn.

Consistent ultra-top performer; frequent "Rep of the month" broker contest winner for most new business including one 6-month-straight streak, and became a leader even without being a manager, to my fellow individual sales contributors.

Agency & SaaS Founder || Driving Sustainable, Healthy Growth @ RevenueZen & Aware

--> RevenueZen (B2B Growth Agency): revenuezen.com/contact
--> Aware (LinkedIn engagement tool): useaware.co

My work focuses on the highest-possible ROI growth strategies available, primarily for B2B companies. I've spent over a decade studying the craft of revenue: sales, marketing, demand gen, social selling, SEO, LinkedIn, outbound sales development, leadership, revenue operations, and financial planning.

Our agency clients are B2B SaaS companies in their Series A-C stage looking to maximize the middle and bottom of funnel through SEO and social media; and Professional Services companies that want to grow through LinkedIn thought leadership and website-sourced qualified lead generation.

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More about Aware...

Hundreds of individual sellers, teams, LinkedIn DFY agencies, and business owners have signed up for Aware to engage on LinkedIn in a more targeted and focused way, with custom dynamic post feeds that save 45 mins/day on outbound commenting work. It's a critical tool for spending less time clicking around trying to find which posts to engage with, and more time engaging thoughtfully on the right people's posts.

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More about RevenueZen...

I'm proud that we are ranked as a Clutch.co Top SEO Agency, with ample 5/5 star ratings. Some of the testimonials that make me the feel the most fulfilled include:

"Our partnership has been a blessing, and we couldn't have grown as quickly without them. We've seen incredible return on our investment with Revenue Zen and can account about 30% of our overall top line revenue to their efforts across multi-channels."
- Chief Revenue Officer @ SMB, Bootstrapped, High-Growth

"They are so knowledgeable about all things digital whether it is content, social media, SEO or your website. They are able to see us through from strategy to execution (writing and all included). They understand the big picture and how to help you achieve the goals you set. I come away from every interaction having learned something."
- Director of Marketing @ Mid-market, Post-IPO B2B tech]

"Success in this case is measured in dollars flowing from the commercial market into the company. Momentum has definitely shifted, and we have now closed enough commercial sales that I can directly tie to these efforts to more than cover the costs of the engagement."
- CEO @ SMB, Bootstrapped, High-Growth

We look forward to helping you grow.

Finally able to announce our investment in Juno as we come out of stealth!

Juno is a first-of-its-kind employee benefit that provides life-changing financial support (up to $1m in cash per family) and personalized guidance when a child becomes severely ill, injured, or disabled.

Every year in America, more than 100,000 parents learn their child has a severe disability or rare disease, is seriously injured in an accident, or has cancer. Because we lack a universal financial safety net for long-term caregiving, many face enormous financial stress – simply to provide care for their family. We can do better.

If you feel motivated to send a link to junokids[dot]com to your HR Manager and/or Benefits Broker requesting this benefit for your org, please do so!

Grateful for your support 🙏🏻

This is hands down the most valuable resource I’ve ever given away for free.

My team and I spent over 60 hours writing a step by step handbook on how we help SaaS CMOs generate $2-5M/mo in incremental new ARR.

Every month.

It covers:

→ How to build sustainable, revenue-generating SEO assets your CFO will love (not “traffic traps” that cost $100k/yr or more)

→ How to figure out which Money Keywords have the EXACT search intent you want, to generate 40+ SQLs per month

→ How to build Money Page assets that attract buyers that "have their wallets out" for making five and six figure purchases

→ The secret way we generate revenue via the "blog"... (and it's is NOTHING like the way 90% of marketers treat their blog)

→ What the majority of agencies don't want you to know about link building and how to avoid wasting valuable time and money on it

→ How to detect the straight-up lies that most SEO agencies tell their clients about attributing sales from organic search

And a ton more.

We charge $15k/mo+ to implement this as a service. But I'm giving away all of our best knowledge for free.

Why? Demand gen marketers have had a tough run the last year and a half. You deserve a boost.

💬 Download it now right here: https://lnkd.in/eqjsY4HP

Leave a comment if you have any questions!

Please... make it stop.

These AI generated comments are driving me nuts.

Can someone make an anti-AI whose job it is to detect GPT-generated comments, and flag or remove them?

Putting this out there:

I want to invest up to $3M in your business. RevenueZen and Onfolio Holdings, Inc (Nasdaq | ONFO) want to coinvest with me.

Why?

Well, we love digital and services companies as an asset class. And we know how to grow them (done it a ton of times across agencies, SaaS, publisher websites, membership sites, etc). We understand organic, content, community, SEO, and believe in sustainable long-term growth.

In other words:

If no VC would ever want to invest because your growth is sub-100%/yr and you're profitable, WE probably DO want to invest.

Now...

Why might you want me/us as your business partner?

1. CAPITAL
You want to take some risk off the table and get an infusion of money, whether for a safety net or for doubling down on proven growth strategies.

2. PARTNERSHIP
It's lonely as hell being the majority shareholder. What if you had a team of expert advisors looking out for you, coaching you, sending you leads, working with you on tough problems, setting up models and back office and sales/lead gen systems, while providing guidance and a sounding board? Sounds kinda nice, right?

3. GROWTH
Maybe you want to take over your industry, buy other companies similar to yours, and be part of a greater whole. Maybe you like the idea of doing this as a team, with you leading. Maybe you've heard the term "roll-up" and think it sounds interesting, but you would only want to do it *well*, not in a sh!tty short-sighted icky way. (Or maybe you want to be part of the future trajectory, but in a more well-defined role than what you're doing now. e.g. maybe you want to only do client work but not sales, or vice versa. Fair game, let's partner with you on that.)

4. FUTURE ACQUISITION
Maybe you *don't* want to go big. Not yourself, at least, or not with this company. You'd rather sell a portion of your company now, gain a business partner (see above!), taste what it's like to undergo full M&A of your company while selling 10% - 55%, and queue up a potential full acquisition partner down the road when you're ready (us, or someone else if it makes sense).

What say you?

Comment for reach, refer your friends, DM me.

Let's build something great, and build an amazing future for you.

Would love to chat.

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Oh, and by the way.

If you'd rather sell us 90-100% of your company, we also want to do that too. Purchase price starting at $200-$400k, going all the way up to $15M and beyond depending on the company.

Just depends what you wanna do.

Just checked, and:

🎉 RevenueZen billed its ten millionth dollar of revenue back in February.

Feeling moderately proud of this.

We're not a behemoth agency (our clients would hate that). But we've made enough to also practice what we preach:

→ Diversified pipeline sources
→ Referral driven plus heavy community presence
→ Consistent leads from SEO
→ Great client retention and relationship focus
→ Adaptable, refining our offerings over 7+ year track record

Pretty cool.

Next stop? $10M run rate.

LFG.

Boom:

My SaaS company Aware now has 600 active users.

We don't have a freemium model—these are all paying customers.

Here's what it does, if you're curious:
→ Automatically compiles lists of great people for you to engage with
→ Provides out of the box influencer lists by niche (no setup required)
→ Tells you which of your posts did the best and what topics excel for you
→ Tracks your social selling and LinkedIn performance metrics
→ Syncs all of your LinkedIn activity with SFDC and Hubspot (Sales Ops, this one's for you...)

If you're doing intentional, strategic commenting on LinkedIn: you'll save 30-60 minutes DAILY with Aware vs without.

Try it out.

We're headed to the moon.

And we can't wait to have you in.

🙏🏼

Late last year, Hiline exited to Red Iron Group.

My small part in this:

I was honored to serve as a revenue advisor to the CEO, in addition to RevenueZen serving as the growth agency to the marketing leadership.

As a team, we clocked in over 40% y/y ARR growth, and then successfully exited to Red Iron Group (private equity firm) at a highly-strategic multiple.

(The exit was really more of an "entrance", as the team is growing faster than ever and the CEO is embracing an even larger vision for building a better accounting, tax, bookkeeping, payroll, and HR services org.)

Then:

Wasting no time at all, Hiline and RIG acquired Calculate in February of this year.

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I'm very proud of the work that they've done. Though this was far from my first rodeo in the back office services space (after my tenure at inDinero started almost a decade ago), it was wonderful and refreshing to work with Hiline. Their Upstate NY based team is earnest, hardworking, and high integrity.

Big congrats to Hiline on their acquisition, with no doubt many more to come!

I look forward to continuing to cheer you all on, now from the sidelines ❤️

One of the biggest wastes in sales development?

Spending hours dialing people that don't pick up.

Think about it:

How much time are your reps spending just SITTING there, letting the phone ring, every day?

And if you're using a power dialer, that's great, BUT:
1. It's expensive per dial, and
2. You're still just dialing people who don't pick up vs those who do
3. You're unknowingly dialing wrong numbers (49.2% of cell phone #s in most databases are wrong!) and people who have changed jobs

The only player in the space that really has this down:

Modigie, Inc.

No idea why Apollo or ZoomInfo hasn't acquired them outright, yet.
(Seems like a clear winning M&A move, though I don't know the financials)

For my part:

RevenueZen is about to kick off a 30 day pilot with Modigie to improve our cell phone coverage on key accounts.

I'm excited to see the results.

We did the math on a hypothetical 5-person BDR team, dialing 650 net new prospects 2x/mo on average.

Check out my spreadsheet:

You spend $1.50 or so per cell phone number, yes. Sounds pricey in a way but not too bad. But now if those are *net new people you couldn't have reached before*... or people whose numbers you thought you had but the data was wrong... then you're calling a less saturated part of your TAM.

One you didn't previously have access to by phone, at all.

Even with just a 50% lift in Dial To Connect rate and no other KPI improvements, the numbers make sense:
→ Additional 1-4 meetings set per month per BDR means 10-20% additional quota attainment 
→ Factoring in margins and risk but assuming your BDR process is proven, it's at least 3-8X multiple on spend if not more

This could make or break the profitability of your BDR team as a whole.

I asked Dee and their CRO if they'd roll out the red carpet for anyone in my network who wanted to give this a shot with us for free... they said, definitely, PROVIDED THAT:
→ You have at least 5 outbound focused callers (XDRs of some sort)
→ Dialing at least 200 US based prospects per month if not more
→ Have been running sales dev for at least 3-6 months if not longer
→ Using a professional sales engagement tool
→ Using Salesforce (sorry, no Hubspot here)

If you meet that criteria, you'll get free access to their data FOR A MONTH. 

Including a link here to kick off a trial, or just feel free to DM me and I'll do an intro
https://lnkd.in/eT55zRJp

Question is...

Which big data provider is gonna acquire Modigie first and take them off the market?!

Game on.

Dee Acosta 📱

It's tough to boil down marketing ROI to any one channel (that's not how... any of this works).

But sometimes, the CEO shakes you down:

"I need that report on the ROI from SEO last year!", she says.

We've all been there.

Let me help.

If you DO build an ROI report for one single channel in isolation like this, keep it simple. [check the example]

A few tips.

1. Put the revenue, pipeline, and lead numbers front and center
2. Make it a little more like a sales dashboard than a marketing dashboard
3. One module MAX dedicated to keywords, traffic, or landing pages
4. Show charts going up and to the right. Boards love that stuff :)
5. Offer to include certain metrics (rankings, keywords, etc) as an addendum

The big idea is this:

Don't give marketing data to non-marketing executives. Board members care about sales numbers ands pipeline trends. If they do have a marketing background, that's fine send away; just don't proactively offer up data that's too granular, to non practitioners.

Of course, you need to HAVE and be prepared to EXPLAIN the underlying data.

Just don't present it without context.

Internal sales is the toughest sales job there is... and all of you VPs of Demand Gen are crushing it every day.

Respect 💪🏼

"Demand Gen vs Lead Gen".

Catchy.

But it's a false distinction.

Brand marketing has been around since... I mean, the advent of capitalism, basically? That's nothing new.

And it's ABSOLUTELY true that from 2005 - 2020 many B2B companies overindexed on direct response marketing, while trying to save money by underinvesting in brand.

It actually worked for quite a while.

Then COVID really put a stop to all that, because we ramped up all of the bad stuff while prospects got really tired of it, really fast.

But to turn around and argue that 80% of your budget should go into paid social ads focused only on in-feed content consumption is taking it too far.

And that's saying something, coming from me:

I'm a hardcore content guy.

But I spent a decade in the trenches, selling and leading sales teams... and this is one of the things I learned 👇🏼

Sometimes:

→ You gotta knock on doors or send a few unsolicited DMs
→ You gotta be there when your lead is Googling for the problem they want to solve
→ You gotta meet people at events and conferences and have a sit down chat

When it comes to budgeting: it's less about taking the [80% awareness vs 20% activation] and flipping that all the way around to 20/80.

Reality is, it's more like 50/50. Or 60/40.

But truthfully, it's different for every company.

There's no one right answer.

The answer is for the CMO and CFO to build such a close, rad relationship, that they have the resources to figure out exactly what the split should be.

The answer is to avoid "extreme thinking".

Instead, buckle down and do the hard work:
→ Map out your AE capacity and make sure you don't have too many AEs with too little demand gen
→ Take a hard look at which channels are costing you a MINT yet making no contribution to the buildup of your actual marketing assets (looking at you, 90% of content syndication initiatives)
→ Focus on converting more hand-raiser leads into paying customers
→ Build and maintain your content and community assets

It's equally wasteful to dump money into ice-cold outreach, as it is to spend your whole war chest on brand awareness without activating that awareness with good, solid lead gen programs.

Let's let 2024 be the year of investing in marketing ASSETS, and contributing to ecosystems more than we take from them.

---

P.S. I have an idea... do we think it's a good idea to run more Excel and finance training for demand gen folks? And vice versa for CFOs? That feels like the relationship that needs the most work.

P.P.S. Need a partner for building your website and content assets, your community marketing plan? You know what to do: revenuezen[dot]com/contact

There is a yawning chasm between these two ideas:

"AI is coming to my rescue to do my work for me"
vs "Some forms of AI are wonderful tools to automate the soul-crushing parts of the work that we're doing"

In other words, it's the Replacement vs Copilot debate for marketing.

Since the early days of the ChatGPT release, I've been confident about this and I still am:

❌ The Replacement thesis is misguided and incorrect.
✅ The Copilot thesis is far closer to reality.

I saw a great Reddit post on this that amounted to something like, "Everyone wants to use AI to create content, but nobody wants to consume AI-generated content."

Let me ask you this...

Do you like reading 10 AI-generated comments on LinkedIn posts?
Do you enjoy reading ChatGPT-generated blog posts?
Do you want more "automated outbound SDR" spam, not less?

No?

Then why in the absolute hell is this something people think is a good idea?

Avoiding the intellectually difficult, mentally intensive strategic narrative work - the work that really informs the basis of your BEST content - will never pay off.

Use AI as a copilot: project management, editing, making sure you don't ramble, gathering info from a bunch of different sources and summarizing it, etc.

If you stop using your head and delegate the thinking to an LLM, your career will stall.

So when people say, "you must become an AI company or you'll fail", there are a million ways to interpret this (and it's of course a ridiculous generalization).

But it ABSOLUTELY DOES NOT mean that you need to blanket adopt AI in the actual generation of content.

The more others produce bland, dry, stale, regurgitated content...

The more you must stand out.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR IN ACQUISITIONS

1. Do we keep the clients?
→ Higher Net Revenue Retention (NRR), better valuation

2. Who's gonna run it after we buy?
→ Got a management team or will we need to hire a CEO?

3. Is the customer acquisition all done through a departing person?
→ Looking for diversified pipe sources

4. Is this a 'real brand'?
→ We want to see a brand that people would miss if it was gone

I invest personally, and I coinvest alongside corporate buyers and PE firms 🙏 

Let me know if this might be a fit for you.

Acquisition C

The essence of social selling is:

✅ Helping People Publicly.

It's not:
❌ helping people only in private (that's part of selling and conusulting)
❌ only *promoting* in public (that's part of marketing)
❌ blasting your network with a pitch (that's lame)

Whether you're looking at this from a Marketing or a Sales perspective, or if you're the CEO, think of it like Helping People Publicly.

Give, give, give. But do so with insight. Lead with your core narrative, your thesis.

Eventually, you will reach an inflection point where you start to GET a lot more than what you put in originally. The market rewards you.

But you MUST break free your demand gen strategy of "we use LinkedIn to run lead capture ads and re-post company blog content".

And you can help people in private on discovery calls and even webinars, but that doesn't scale as well as doing it in public. There's nothing quite like the free organic reach of B2B social media.

Help your market be badass at the core Job To Be Done, that your solution helps them with. Inventory forecasting, sales training, API SDKs, etc.

Do this, and do it in front of hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands of eyes.

THIS is the way.

The 3 Principles of Social Selling

Starting to get verified reviews on G2 for Aware.

We've tripled MRR this YTD, which is just... 🤌🏼

So.

My fellow SaaS bootstrappers: any tips on getting more G2 reviews in a way that doesn't involve giving all of my money to them?

(And how much does this channel matter in these very early stages?)

Let's say you just acquired another company.

Their website ranks for some juicy organic SEO keywords, and you don't want to lose that.

Here's how to NOT muck up your SEO as you merge the two websites:

1. DO A CONTENT AUDIT
Gotta have alignment in advance. Presumably you know already which site will remain after the migration. So, you'll need to look at the site being absorbed, in depth. What does it rank for? Are any of its pages completely irrelevant? Do a full Content Audit (DM me if you need this audit template!) to identify which pages need to be culled vs kept. Run this by other stakeholders to make sure you're keeping everything necessary, but not so much that you're diluting your own site.

2. DECIDE WHAT CONTENT TO KEEP OUTRIGHT
Some of the content you'll want to keep outright. In other words, you'll copy it over to your site, draft and stage an equivalent page on your site with virtually no changes, edit the content minimally to fit the new brand, and mark both the source and destination URL on the content audit. Categorize as "Copy & Keep" and move on for now.

3. DECIDE WHAT CONTENT TO MERGE WITH YOURS
Some of the source content from the new site won't be relevant to yours, OR it'll be sort of duplicate with a similar page you already have, so you won't want to keep both. Unless the page is thoroughly, completely, off the wall irrelevant: DO *NOT* DELETE IT!! But also don't copy the content and move it to your own site as above. Mark it down on the content audit as "Merge & Redirect", and set the Destination URL to a page on your site that needs the link juice, and is very relevant to the Source URL's content. If there are no good targets, set it to your home page. By the way, the merging site's home page will be merged to your existing home page, in this same way.

4. GET INTERNAL REVIEW & APPROVAL
Don't do a thing without getting approval from other stakeholders. Once you've finished mapping the Keep vs Irrelevant content, give your content audit sheet to the group (CMO, OldCo webmaster, etc) and ask for feedback. Make sure you're not missing anything important.

5. BACK THE WHOLE THING UP
Head over to Wayback Machine and submit the whole darn thing for archival in case you mess up. Crawl site with Screaming Frog and Ahrefs, and save the full crawl file. Make a note of Google Analytics and GSC traffic for each site, for benchmarking.

6. CONVERT ALL INTERNAL LINKS
On your staging site, all those internal links on the old site's content should ideally be replaced with links to the new content and URLs you're creating. Replace 'em with updated versions.

7. MERGE REVIEW SITE PROFILES
If the site has reviews, request to merge the profiles. G2, Clutch, Google, etc will usually merge them if you can provide proof you have acquired the company and that you control both sites. The review sites do support overall SEO, so don't skip this step.

8. DON'T DO THIS ON YOUR OWN
Just hire RevenueZen to manage the SEO aspect of your M&A 🙌 

Finally got to Slackbox Zero last night.

Not a single "for later" reminder.

I cannot express how much joy this tiny little victory brings me.

#productivity #zen

P.S. Thank you, tiny whale emoji 🐳... you are a breath of fresh air in this world.

Someone recently asked me how Aware is different from your garden variety LinkedIn analytics tool, say Shield or Inlytics.

(Hint - they're nothing alike!)

Here's my answer... how I use Aware to write several hundred comments a month, in just 10-12 minutes a day:

→ WHEN THE POST GOES UP
From ~5 minutes before I post to ~5 minutes after, I try to do as much commenting as possible

→ COMMUNITY
I start with the "community" tab in Aware, and engage with as many relevant posts as possible, say 5-10

→ INFLUENCERS
I move to either one of the Influencers lists — for me that might be the "Marketing" or "Venture Capital" list — and I do the same, say another 5-10 comments

→ REPLIES
Finally, I check my Replies section for any comments I'd previously missed. There are almost always some. I engage with all of those. Throughout all of this, I'm "skipping" posts that aren't relevant to engage with.

→ CUSTOM FEEDS
If I want to do more, I go to My Lists and engage with posts appearing on my Custom Lists, for example those covering posts with certain keywords or by people with certain titles... or posts on my "named person lists".

**Intentional engagement** is the value of Aware as a tool, and it's something that no other product offers.

It's a tool our customers use to do the majority of their commenting, because it's way easier and faster than doing it by scrolling the feed.

--

tl;dr - Aware is a wildly, completely different product than Shield. Shield does just 'analytics' and nothing else. Aware offers analytics, but the core of what it does is to help you engage with the right people, faster, in less time.

✅ Get your free trial started at useaware[dot]co

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