Building a Revenue Engine

The Objective of Revenue Management is to create Predictable, Scalable, and Sustainable Revenue period over period. 

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A core principle of Revenue Management is a collaborative, agile, and accountable process driven relationship between Sales, Marketing, and Customer Success (Delivery / Product Management). 

Revenue Management is an Agile process to seek, absorb, analyze, and act in an iterative fashion to market feedback.  

Customers and Prospects are looking to your organization to help them understand their risks, opportunities and how they are most efficiently addressed. What data, information, knowledge, and wisdom is your team able to provide to your market? What is the narrative being delivered, and what message is packaged within the story? How is engagement created? What cause is your organization the champion of, who are you fighting for, against what/whom, and what is the prize for victory?

Change is a certainty. The behaviour, needs, and perspective of your target market are changing at an increasing pace. Your Go to Market approach can adapt with and even lead your target market. This requires actively listening to your customers, prospects, and the environment around them. Take leadership to influence the learning curve of your prospect; be a catalyst of change, not a respondent.  

The fuel of a Revenue Engine is Qualified Leads. Traditionally, and still the most common lead generation model, is volume. Sales and marketing produce as many touch points to the target market as possible, with success being dictated by volume and conversion. However, this is inefficient, painful to your team and your prospects and inconsistent (NO ONE LIKES COLD CALLS).

The generation of consistent, qualified, and quality leads to your sales team is the way to improve revenue velocity, conversion rates, and sales efficiency.   

The foundation of Revenue Management comes from Customer Success. The success of your existing customer set is the most compelling story you can convey to your target market. Build a clear and detailed understanding of how you deliver value to your current customers. Have your customers tell their success stories to enable Customer Advocacy. Use your existing customer success to create the marketing and sales narrative in your marketplace. Two thirds of the buying process is completed by the time a prospect directly connects with a sales person. Ensure that they are learning from your successes with their peers through Customer Success driven Content Marketing. 

Marketing, at its best, is an expression of your company culture to the market. People buy from people, and most decisions are made first and foremost with the gut and then justified with the mind.  People connect with Why you do what you do, not so much what. 

The proliferation of channels (email, search, display, PPC, blogging, microsites, online communities, social media, live chat, etc.) creates an amazing listening platform for marketers to gather insight on the needs, wants, and interests of their ideal prospects. Creating an Agile marketing team that is constantly analyzing and actioning signals from the marketplace into outreach, messaging and campaigns is critical to positioning your brand for market leadership. Marketing oriented for learning and teaching will form the basis for a qualified lead generation machine. Incorporating information, data, and insight from the market, prospects, customers, sales, product management, and customer success will allow marketing to analyze and act with precision, velocity, and power. High quality leads are the fuel for a Revenue Engine. 

Revenue Management provides the leadership to integrate learning, analysis, and action across market interactions to optimize revenue generation. A Revenue Manager breaks down the silos between Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, Product and Management with a customer centric, data driven, agile Go to Market operation. Revenue Managers are the engineers of your Revenue Engine. 

Key Takeaways:

  1. Your value proposition is what your customers say it is.
  2. Deliver that value to a well defined ideal customer. 
  3. Learn from your customers, prospects and marketplace. Teach what you have learned. 
  4. Take a stand. People seek the Why not the What. 
  5. All engines require fuel. Qualified leads are the fuel of a Revenue Engine.