Anchor Group Podcast: Episode 18
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Podcast Transcript:
Michael (00:00)
Hey everybody, thanks for joining the Anchor Group podcast. This is episode 18. Today, Caleb and I are going to talk about how you can increase your revenue online by a million dollars—what strategies and tactics it’s going to take in 2025 to do that. So if that’s of interest, stay tuned. Let’s get into it.
Caleb, thanks for joining the podcast today. I’m excited about this one. We’re going to actually be able to talk through some tactics and strategies for helping those out there listening increase the revenue on their website. I know around this time of year, a lot of people hit those plateaus. They set goals at the beginning of the year, they put some stuff into motion, but now they’re kind of reaching a plateau—or at least that’s what they feel like. So this could be really valuable for a lot of different companies, whether it’s B2C or B2B—tactics to get them off of a plateau and really increase their online revenue by a million dollars.
Caleb (00:57)
This is a really common place that people get stuck at. I find that strategy is one of those areas people really lack in when they’re trying to get past that plateau. A lot of times, they randomly go after strategies that occur to them and just try them—but it doesn’t work—instead of being more strategic, doing full brainstorming exercises, and prioritizing those ideas.
When I go through different strategy exercises, I end up pulling together a list of at least 30 different things we could go execute, and then prioritize from there. That’s a much better way to go about it than just trying to figure it out one step at a time and guessing. Using more metrics and a bigger brainstorming list is one of my favorite things.
So if someone is trying to be more strategic in getting that new $1 million in revenue, this is a good podcast episode. It'll help you brainstorm and go through that exercise—generate some ideas—so when you go into your own strategy, this gets you started on the right path. We won’t get through all 30 that I normally do with clients, but this will at least help you start thinking through all those options and maybe get the creative juices running a little more than normal. That’s kind of my intention here.
Michael (02:17)
That’s right. And just to branch off of that, there’s no magic elixir to this, right? You can’t wake up one morning—and I know many people know this—but also just to manage everybody’s expectations. Even internally, if you’re listening right now and you’re like, “Man, I want to flip a switch tomorrow and turn on the burners and get on the right track”—this takes time.
You can’t just take a magic elixir and automatically have this happen. There is work that needs to go into place. Caleb, as you mentioned, you’ve got to vet different ideas and possibilities. So yeah, that’s step one.
Caleb (02:54)
Step one—people often skip to a conclusion, and then it’s a swing and a miss over and over again without the strategy. So step one is strategy.
Michael (03:03)
That’s right. So let’s take this from a high level and then break it down. My perspective at a high level: in order to increase your website revenue by a million dollars in 2025, you really can look at it two ways. You can think about a defensive approach, or you can look at the offensive side of things.
When I think about defense, I’m using that term lightly. I think of it more as: what systems do you have in place currently that maybe aren’t functioning the way they should? What can you do to optimize them—to save money you’re currently spending—whether that’s through time, energy, effort, or trimming the fat off software or licenses? That all fits in the defensive camp.
Whereas I think most people’s minds go automatically to the offensive side of the ball—what new strategies and tactics can I use to get net new dollars coming in from net new customers? That’s the direction I’d like us to go: focusing on offense, not so much defense.
Caleb (04:17)
And I think what you mean by defense is: when we talk about strategies to get through that plateau and increase by another million, people might communicate that as a million in profit or a million in revenue. So if you’re thinking about the defensive approach, that would be increasing your margin by a million because you’re reducing costs. It’s not necessarily increasing your revenue or traffic from your website.
So when we say defense, that’s what we’re referring to. When we say offense, we’re really talking about increasing revenue—not just reducing costs. It’s about both profit margin and revenue.
Michael (04:51)
Yeah, very well put. That’s exactly right.
When I think about this, the first thing that comes to mind is traffic. You can have the best product in the world, the best website setup, the best of everything—but if customers don’t know you exist, or potential customers don’t know you exist, then you don’t really exist. So traffic is where my mind goes right off the bat—something to hone in on right away and think through processes, strategies, tactics to start down this path. What are your thoughts on that, Caleb?
Caleb (05:43)
Yeah, I think there are some new strategies that have evolved in the last 12 months that maybe haven’t been tapped into or considered. Most commonly, people think about ads, social media, SEO—but a new player is AEO: AI Engine Optimization. It’s probably most similar to SEO.
We get leads via AI. People are searching through it in some industries, and I wouldn’t be surprised if more industries start seeing that behavior—people using AI to look for queries and information that might lead them to you. It really depends on your industry and what you sell, but I would constantly be monitoring it. Things could flip pretty quickly.
Even blog posts or articles related to your website—blog content and a strong thought leadership process is one of the best ways you can generate traffic. AI is going to use deeper thought leadership, reference your article, and get people in the door to read the whole thing.
That’s a great technique. I’m a big fan of blog content. It’s something I’ve been thinking about improving more this year. I’ve been focused on how to create more processes to interview our delivery team so we can get more landing pages and blog posts for completed projects. I just can’t keep up.
But creating more processes around someone in that demand generation or marketing role to interview your internal team and create that content—have a content schedule—that’s huge. I think we have at least three to five posts a week going out consistently, from troubleshooting articles to actual thought leadership.
You can make it more of a process, with better templating and more strategy on those blog posts. That’s something I’ve realized I was weaker on until this point. I’m adapting for AI to handle that. I’m actively spending half my day doing that and building templates. I’m a big fan of that.
Michael (08:16)
Caleb, quick question for you—have you started to use AI to search for stuff? Even outside of work, when you want to buy something, have you started to use AI for those searches?
Caleb (08:31)
Not yet. The only time I’ve done that is to test how someone might find me in those searches and how it would come up. So I use it mainly to test theories about how someone might find me.
But my behavior has slowly been changing. I am using AI more frequently—for cleaning up content a little bit, making it more concise. I can be a bit wordy, so I use it to make things tighter. It helps provide that perspective and a quick cleanup of information.
So I haven’t done a lot as a consumer yet, but I am using AI more than I was a year ago. And I’d anticipate that behavior will continue to change over the next year.
Michael (09:23)
Yeah. So, Caleb, here’s the deal. I want to share a little story because as you were talking about that, I actually—within the past month—have started to use AI for certain things. And here’s how the flow has worked for me as a consumer of products.
For example, my family and I have a large garden this year, and we’re trying to do the whole homestead thing—preserve some of the food for the winter. Part of that is canning and fermenting. So I went on ChatGPT and was looking for information about what goes into canning—how do you preserve food, stuff like that. And you were referencing blog articles. When I was doing that informational search, a lot of blog articles came up—not as many landing pages—but the sites the AI was referencing were mostly blogs and company websites in the canning industry.
Then, at the end of these AI prompts, what I’ve been seeing is the algorithm prompts you with another question, like “Do you want me to search for recipes?” I followed a couple of those prompts, and eventually the algorithm was asking if I wanted product recommendations. I was like, sure, let’s do this. Next thing you know, I’m getting product recommendations based on the history of the “conversation.”
The reason I bring this up is because I feel like that’s a firsthand example—a small one, right? We’re just talking about canning supplies for tomatoes or whatever—but think about that on a larger scale, especially if a merchant is in a complex industry, way more complex than canning. I could see someone needing to easily reference and digest a lot of information about a complex topic or product, and then ultimately asking for recommendations.
This points out one thing to me: merchants now need to be even more in tune with their product descriptions on their website. Because ultimately, when we think about where AI is pulling all this data—where it’s mining for data—when I’m asking for products, of course it’s going to the product description pages.
I know for a long time people have said, “Yeah, we need to update our product description pages,” but now I think we’re going to see a shift. If you want to increase traffic and AI is part of that, you need to optimize your product descriptions for these AI algorithms. I’m not sure yet what that necessarily looks like, since this is a new and evolving thing, but I feel like we’re going to start seeing a shift in the talk track and approach pretty soon.
Caleb (12:28)
Yeah, I think that was a great example of how search engine optimization—traditional SEO—is very similar to AI optimization. Google crawls product pages for keywords and strings of text, and I think AI is doing it in a very similar way.
As I was listening to you talk through your experience as a consumer, I thought, “You know what I really need to do?” I need to go test how someone might find me and make sure I’m creating content for each of the prompts AI is generating.
If I were selling canning supplies, that would tell me I should go create blog articles on how to do XYZ—how to can, how to use supplies. And if I don’t have recipes today, but it’s prompting about recipes, then I should probably create content around recipes too. That might be a gap I’ve missed.
If it’s prompting you with that, you should make sure you have content to match, so you can be brought up throughout the user experience. Eventually, they’ll find your product and see that you came up multiple times. In my use case, I’ll probably do something similar—searching terms like “consultants,” “BigCommerce developers,” and working through different stages of prompts. I’ll even go higher level, like “What are the best ERP solutions?” or “What’s the best B2B e-commerce platform?”—just to see what type of content I might be missing in that journey. That’s probably how I’m going to research this a bit.
Michael (14:14)
One thing I appreciate that you’re pointing out, Caleb, is that AI and SEO—optimizing for both—might very well be one and the same for most companies. If you think about even the format of Google a year and a half ago, you’d do a search query up top, and then it would prompt you with—what was it? Related questions?
Now, when we throw it into an AI model, just take it at a fundamental level—the format or medium is different—but those questions are probably pretty similar to what AI is prompting versus what Google would have displayed in a dropdown fashion a year and a half ago.
I know a lot of people, especially business owners, have red flags up about AI—and maybe that’s good. But I think with the SEO piece and the goal of generating traffic to your website, we don’t need to take such a doomsday approach. As long as a merchant has been doing a good job with SEO up to this point, they’re probably in good shape. And if not, now’s a good time to hop on that SEO bandwagon and really invest time, energy, and effort with the internal team to get traffic.
Ultimately, the reason we got down this path is because today we’re talking about how to increase your revenue on your website by a million dollars—and how to get off a plateau if you’re currently stuck on one.
Caleb (15:51)
Yeah, I thought the AI conversation was really worthwhile. We touched a bit on how it relates to SEO. We talk about SEO in more detail in other conversations—in terms of what I do and the strategies involved—but the next thing I wanted to talk about is other forms of traffic that are a little outside the box.
People typically think of social media, SEO, AEO—those traditional formats—and those are all valid. But one advantage B2B e-commerce merchants have is they’ve got another lever they can pull. They often have people taking phone orders or orders via email, manually plugging in those sales into their ERP or order management system.
One opportunity is to get more of those customers who are calling in all the time to change their behavior and use the website more. I’ve got a number of strategies I like to roll out for that—create incentivization programs for both the sales reps and the customers to help drive that behavior.
Then all of a sudden, you’ve got another asset. You’re shifting revenue from phone or email orders to your website. Now, you might ask, “Isn’t that just shifting revenue, not increasing it by a million?” But here’s the thing—you’ve now freed up an asset. That sales rep can use their time for what they do best: relationships. They can build a bigger book of business, go outbound, target more strategic accounts, and ultimately generate more revenue.
It’s a bit of a dance—shifting your resources, moving people to the website. The more traffic you get to the website, the more automation exists. And the more automation you have, the more time and overhead you free up. That’s probably one area of traffic that’s often missed when thinking about increasing revenue.
Michael (18:02)
Yeah, I love that idea. Ultimately, redelegating some resources and shifting responsibilities is a great way to free up people’s time and, as you’re saying, help shift traffic to actually go through the website instead of always going offline.
Caleb (18:20)
What else though, Michael? Other than traffic, what else do you think?
Michael (18:25)
I think there are a lot of different ways we could go with this, but there are kind of two other camps outside of traffic. One is usability and flow—the ease of use. Think UX and UI on the website once your traffic actually lands there.
In my mind, I think of website traffic a lot like electricity. Electricity takes the path of least resistance, right? Caleb, I know you’re an engineer—am I getting that one right? I use that as an analogy. People aren’t electricity, but we generally do like taking the path of least resistance. We’ve got plenty of examples of that.
So I think that’s one whole area, and within that bucket, there are probably thirty things you could focus on. A different bucket would be your offer. Because you can get traffic, and you can get people flowing to the right spots—but ultimately, if your offer isn’t up to snuff with the rest of the industry, that’s another pain point. You could have money slipping through the cracks, a leaky bucket, if your offer isn’t right.
I think we could dive deeper into that in a future podcast, but one thing I’d hit on now is usability, flow, UX, UI. Here at Anchor Group, we build out a lot of buyer portals for B2B-focused companies. My Account sections for B2C companies can also be very important.
A lot of times, these are overlooked. It’s just like, “Yeah, if somebody needs to manage an order, great, we need a place for them to go.” But I think this can quickly become a real powerhouse within a website. I know, Caleb, you’ve worked with many clients and built out a lot of these portals, so maybe you’ve got some good ideas about how to supercharge a B2B portal—to help with that flow, make reordering easier, and get off that plateau to hit that $1 million revenue increase. Any thoughts on how to improve a portal?
Caleb (20:57)
Yeah. If I wanted to get more customers to use a website and have a better usability experience, the first thing I would do is interview everyone who takes phone calls from customers. That’s step one. Whether it’s your customer service team or a sales rep, I’d interview each of them to extract the types of things customers are asking about.
Because realistically, what a sales rep or customer service rep is doing is looking in the ERP—like NetSuite—getting some information, and then communicating it back to the customer. That’s exactly what a portal does. All we need to do is interview them, understand the types of activities, the volume, how much time it takes to get that information—and then prioritize those tasks and build them into the customer portal.
From there, you make it more self-service so customers can get more information on their own. Train customers that there’s more value in using the portal—that they can access more info there. That training can be done by letting reps know to tell customers, “Hey, FYI, this is actually available via self-service next time,” or through emails and newsletters about new features.
That’s the number one step I’d take: interviewing the people who are actually interacting with customers over the phone. That would provide the most immediate value.
Michael (22:32)
Yeah, and customer feedback—we can’t undermine that. Because ultimately, every business should want to serve their customers in the best way possible and meet their needs. On the agency side, Caleb, we go out to our customers and ask for their feedback. That’s one of the best ways to get better as a company. And as you’re saying, getting that feedback on the portal is so important to understand exactly what to build.
Caleb (23:02)
Yeah, it helps you know what to build. Otherwise, people are just guessing if they don’t go through that step of interviewing their internal team members.
Michael (23:08)
And let’s be honest—that’s a great way to waste money. Guessing and building something or modifying something and then having it not work—that’s going to waste money, make you feel like a failure. Not a good recipe. Not a good recipe for success.
So as you said at the beginning of this conversation, normally when Anchor Group works with clients, and if this scenario comes up, we’ll do an analysis and run through a gambit of at least 30 different options and vet out what could work. That’s exactly because we don’t want to be wasting time, energy, and effort on any of this stuff.
Caleb (23:48)
Yeah, don’t build something that isn’t actually useful.
Now we’ve talked usability, we’ve talked traffic—let’s go to offers. I’m not going to lie, I don’t know what you mean by offers.
Michael (23:58)
Yeah, so offers.
When we think “offer,” the way I phrase it in my mind is the monetary exchange that’s going to happen. How much money am I paying for this? So things like promotions, incentives, subscriptions, rewards. But also, that’s where I think shipping comes in as well. With Amazon being the behemoth that it is—and I’m thinking more B2C right now—it’s like, man, I feel like in many parts of the e-commerce landscape, free shipping really needs to be part of the offer. Or at least some kind of enticing shipping incentive.
So that’s really what I mean by offer: how much money is it going to cost, how quickly can I get it, and how does that match up compared to the rest of the industry?
There are plenty of levers within that. We mentioned three you could really pull to serve your customer better and get them the product in the best and usually fastest way possible. That’s where promotions come in, and we’ve done a lot with that. But these all ultimately tie together.
If we talk about promotions or subscriptions as part of the offer, that can live within the custom portal—again, thinking B2C. You can highlight a product subscription from a marketing feature, thinking about the top end of the funnel to drive traffic to the website.
So all of this can cohesively work together. And ultimately, I’d have a hard time saying that doing just one of these things in isolation is going to move you off that plateau. I think it’s a “yes, and” situation where you might need to do a few of these. If you take time to sit back, think about it, and plan, these pieces can work together—traffic, usability and flow of your website, and the offer you’re giving customers.
Caleb (26:22)
Yeah, now I understand what you mean by offer, and I have some thoughts to share.
When you need to determine how much you have to sell of a product in order to offer free shipping, it comes down to your profit margin. Understanding that is key. One thing I really like about NetSuite is how well it can calculate your profit margin on products—whether you’re using average costing, standard, or another costing method. When you’re receiving products in, you can capture that landed cost.
Using that information, you can determine how much margin you need because you know your overhead, cost of revenue, cost of goods sold. When you have all the financial data that an ERP provides, it can inform what your maximum offer can be—and then you go introduce it.
That way, you’re not guessing. When you know your true cost of goods sold, you can say, “This is my cost, here’s my ideal price for the margin I want.” And if you’re willing to dip into that gross margin by, say, 10%, then you know how much volume needs to be purchased in the cart to maintain that margin.
You can use that financial information to guide how you structure your offer or promotion. Because if you just keep going lower and lower without knowing the real numbers behind it, that’s a mistake. You’ll dig too much into your margin. So using an offer is a great idea—but combine it with ERP data to make sure you’re structuring that offer in a way that keeps you profitable.
Michael (28:36)
Yeah, and one thing I want to echo is—it’s okay if you have to go slow to go fast.
What I mean is, if you need to go slow and look at your data—which, as you’re pointing out, NetSuite does a fantastic job of consolidating into one cohesive place—take the time to sit down, digest it, and create a plan. That’s what I mean by “go slow.” Putting a great plan in place is only going to expedite your success once you start executing.
Instead of, like we said at the beginning of this podcast, just throwing darts at a dartboard or jumping into quick fixes to get off a plateau—it’s okay to go slow to go fast. Caleb, I know you’ve seen that with many clients. It really is so beneficial to take the time, get a true plan in place, and look at the data before making big moves.
Caleb (29:40)
Yeah. If you don’t crawl, walk, run—it probably means you’re not doing strategy and analysis. It means you’re just swinging and missing.
Michael (29:45)
Which, let’s be honest—every once in a blue moon, you might find some success that way.
But the companies we work with—we want long-term success. We’re going for longevity, not just three to six months of success and then onto the next thing. So I think that’s where we should wrap it today, Caleb.
Caleb (29:53)
True. Yeah.
Michael (30:09)
Thanks for your thoughts. We’ve had some good conversation, and here’s what I’ll say: at one point, we were talking about SEO. If that piqued your interest—if you’re listening right now—go to our podcast channel or to our YouTube page. We actually did an entire episode, maybe episode two or three, where Caleb really broke down our strategies as an agency and what we do for SEO, along with the costs associated with that.
Caleb (30:27)
In the beginning.
Michael (30:38)
I think the tagline is: there’s no such thing as free traffic, but there is such a thing as good traffic. That’s what that episode breaks down. So if that interests you, give it a listen.
I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s an episode in the near future where we continue to dig into more ways to get you off a plateau if you’re currently stuck on one. Here’s what I’ll say—we want this podcast to be helpful to you. On your way home, we want you to be able to plug this in and get some new ideas that could legitimately generate revenue or help you push past some roadblocks.
If you’re listening to this, feel free to drop a comment. If you’re on YouTube, drop a comment or send us an email. You can find Caleb and me on LinkedIn and send us a DM. Ultimately, we want this to be useful. So if there’s something we didn’t cover, or something you want us to dive into, let us know—we’re happy to do it.
Well, Caleb, thanks for joining. And until next time, you guys keep on chasing greatness, and we’ll catch you in the next episode.
Caleb (31:37)
See ya!
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