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Guest: Erin Cigich, CEO of Perform[cb], a leading outcome-based marketing firm that helps brands acquire customers on a performance-based model where companies pay only for real results.
Overview: Every BIG starts small. In order to achieve their vision and sustain growth, the CEO has to establish precise, actionable steps that build towards measurable results. Keep the right numbers trending in the right direction every day, month, quarter, and year, and you’ll keep Making BIG Happen.
On today’s show, Erin Cigich explains how thinking about sales as a “math problem” and working with a CEO coach have been instrumental in helping the company beat its sales target by more than 200%. We also talk about leveraging AI for customer acquisition, clarifying your ideal customer profile, and building a performance-based culture.
Erin Cigich on winning the CEO role:
“I think as a leader, you want to be happy when everyone is succeeding and almost be happier for their success than for your own personal success. You need to have a great team around you. And so you want to see them hitting their goals, developing, achieving the things that they want in their life, and be genuinely happy and driven by that. And so that’s a key thing that we look at when we’re looking for folks to put on the leadership track. Not to say that if you are the type that wants to be an individual contributor that there isn’t a great spot for you at companies — that is just a different skill set and a different focus. But if you want to get on that management track, it can’t be because you want the power. It can’t be because you want the money, it has to be that you genuinely enjoy seeing other folks succeed. And so that’s definitely a big piece of the puzzle for me.
“The other thing is that I am just a voracious problem solver. So I’m always telling my team there’s no new problems in the world. Somebody else has had this problem. They have solved this problem. We just have to find where they are and be inspired by their solution to the problem. And so I’m constantly reading, constantly listening to podcasts, always checking up on how other companies are doing it. Especially out of my industry, I think we get the best ideas there. And so those are some of the characteristics and traits, I think, that helped me win this CEO role 10 years ago.”
Erin Cigich on learning how to break down sales goals:
My coach is Ken Eissing, and he has been phenomenal in helping me think through this. We talked a lot about what my business does for other businesses, but we didn’t have a sophisticated marketing approach. Me, our COO, our EVP of sales — we’ve all been at the business for 15 years, and so we felt like this was what we knew based on all of our industry experience, let’s just attack it this way. And Ken really helped me start to break down and say, ‘This is a math equation.’ If you have a new business target and you have an average net revenue or revenue per new business target, how much new business do you need to get? How many new logos do you need to land? And we got that number. Okay, if that’s how many new logos you need to land, what does the data tell you? How many meetings do you need to have, how many outreaches do you need to have? Now we just need to start monitoring these pieces of the puzzle, right? Ken said, ‘It’s already baked into the data. Let the data tell you.’ And so the combination of that approach and turning sales into an equation, combined with getting really clear on our ideal customer profile, has us tracking to beat our sales target this year by 200-250%. It was a massive unlock for our business.”
Erin Cigich on leveraging AI and allocating your most important resource:
“We are extremely fortunate to be a tech-enabled service with a platform that does a lot of the heavy lifting for us. And having leaned into AI, it’s even more the case. So it is very infrequent that we actually have to add a head in order to provide services to the new brands that we bring on because of the automations that we’ve been able to do. It has been really exciting to see the business grow and flourish in that way.
“What we did do, though, is we carved out an onboarding team. And so in order for folks to absolutely get the most of what Perform[cb] has to offer, to understand our technology, and to really have a great onboarding experience, about a year ago, we took a woman who was an absolute rock star in client services and said, ‘Would you be willing to spearhead this new onboarding team for us?’ The success that we’re seeing in sales is definitely a big part of what her team has been able to generate as well. Her team owns the account for the first 30-to-90 days and really makes sure that they get an absolutely perfect onboarding experience and really are set up to succeed in the future before she hands them off to their full-time, long-term growth manager. That wasn’t an addition of heads, that was a repositioning of how folks existed in the business.”
Links:
How to Build a High-Performance Culture in a Global Company Matt Plitt – Matt Plitt, President & Chief Executive Officer of Valent U.S.A. LLC, explains how he built a culture that balances entrepreneurial spirit with discipline.
How to Define, Measure, and Manage Your Business Goals – Mark Moses, the founder and CEO of CEO Coaching International, discusses how to establish and track the metrics that are crucial to your company’s success.
About CEO Coaching International
CEO Coaching International works with CEOs and their leadership teams to achieve extraordinary results quarter after quarter, year after year. Known globally for its success in coaching growth-focused entrepreneurs to meaningful exits, CEO Coaching International has coached more than 1,000 CEOs and entrepreneurs in more than 60 countries and 45 industries. The coaches at CEO Coaching International are former CEOs, presidents, or executives who have made BIG happen. The firm’s coaches have led double-digit sales and profit growth in businesses ranging in size from startups to over $10 billion, and many are founders that have led their companies through successful eight, nine, and ten-figure exits. Companies working with CEO Coaching International for two years or more have experienced an average revenue CAGR of 31% (2.6X the U.S. average) and an average EBITDA CAGR of 52.3% (more than 5X the U.S. average).
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