Common Sense Revenue Growth: A Senior Executive’s Guide to Growing Your Business in a Disruptive Digital World

Common Sense Revenue Growth is an actionable book for CEOs and their trusted Senior Executives and advisors. It’s designed to be read efficiently on a short plane or commuter rail trip but to provoke big ideas and understandings. By the time you reach your destination, you will have clear insights about why your business may be showing signs of slowing down or why your sales team keeps missing their revenue targets.

This isn’t another book that blames “disruption.” While there is no denying that technology has changed the way we do business and has disrupted whole industries and markets, the real answer is much deeper. People, customers to be exact. The way customers find you, become interested in your solutions, engage with your company, and buy from you has changed dramatically in recent years. Have you adapted to meet those changes?

In this book, Ed Marsh and John McTigue, Gen X and Boomer respectively and who have worked both sides of the equation, as executives and consultants, put their heads together to explain the customer experience phenomenon in a way that makes sense to a business executive.

The authors provide some important context - describing how sales, marketing and customer service have become transformed by the Internet, search engines, mobile devices and artificial intelligence. They dive into how buyers and customers have not only embraced this revolution, but own it, and demand that you play by their rules. They show you what this means for CEOs of B2B manufacturing companies still using sales methodologies and communication strategies created decades ago. Then, they get real about how to solve this problem, how to solve for the customer. They help you envision your company reconfigured to deliver the experience that buyers expect.

Most business books will issue a challenge, to solve your problem by following a series of steps described by an acronym or two. More often than not, the steps in each acronym are too general to do much good, and they leave CEOs wondering how to get started, let alone complete the process. Ed and John have been there and done that, so our roadmap is detailed, and we don’t sugar coat the challenges.

It’s hard to implement the kinds of change you will need to become a customer-centric force in your marketplace, but there are practical steps you can take right now to begin the transformation and work at a sensible pace. Ed and John spell those steps out in detail. Not every member of your team will be thrilled with these changes, and some may forcefully resist, but we help you realize the need and the urgency of persevering for change.

When you arrive at your destination after reading this book, the authors hope you will see the situation around you more clearly and hope that the historical context, the American Revolution, will inspire you to make the necessary changes to embrace the new world and become a market leader for your customers as well as for your stakeholders.

Ed Marsh is a strategy & growth consultant, independent director, author and keynote speaker. He helps executives connect the dots between their corporate aspirations and their team's practical execution.

Ed started his professional career jumping from planes and running raids and ambushes as an Army Airborne Ranger. He launched his civilian career selling and marketing industrial products and services. He's been an industrial distributor sales manager, partners with a German machine manufacturer, a rep for explosive detection devices in Nigeria and he founded and ran a company in India selling used machinery from the US. As Export Advisor to American Express, he uses these experiences and others from markets including Brazil, Vietnam to help companies expand globally.

John McTigue is a digital business strategist and author from Houston, Texas. Having spent nearly thirty-five years in business, John’s resume has some interesting twists and turns. With degrees in geology and geophysics from Yale and the University of Arizona, John started his career as a research scientist at Shell Oil in Houston. John left Shell in 1990 to pursue a career in sales and marketing for service oil companies. John had to understand the technology, how it’s applied, and why it would be valuable to customers. He still believes that this is the right way to sell today.

At the end of the 90’s, John joined the executive team of an independent oil and gas company where he helped raise money for drilling operations. He took his technical sales skills on the road to Wall Street, resulting in the completion of a public offering and listing on NASDAQ. His next venture was as a solopreneur, developing websites for small businesses in the early 2000’s. John developed his own CMS and partnered with Chris Knipper and Kuno Creative, in the Cleveland, OH area.

In 2017 John decided to semi-retire and began a new career as an author and business strategist, with an eye on passing along what he has learned over the years to future business leaders. His collaboration with Ed Marsh on this and future books grew from a friendship they have developed over the agency years and working together as HubSpot Partners. Ed and John have also created a video series called Common Sense in which they discuss, and sometimes debate, the hottest issues facing digital sales and marketing professionals today.