Having built the foundation for a successful revenue engine, what happens next?

By this time you should have a clear revenue objective that’s been widely communicated.  Existing silos between marketing, sales and customer teams should be in the process of being removed and gaps in the funnel and opportunities for automation from technology should have been identified and implemented. But how do you go about accelerating the revenue engine?

Rapidly increasing top line profitability is becoming ever more challenging.  Simply having a revenue engine structure in place won’t deliver results. It’s critical you start accelerating the revenue engine as soon as the foundations have been successfully put in place.

Before planning your acceleration strategy, it’s important we define the difference between these three common and often interchangeably used terms in this context:

  • Growth – the unifying goal of all sales, marketing and revenue generation activities inside the revenue engine is organisational growth.
  • Optimisation – optimisation is tactical, experimental activities performed on specific areas of the revenue engine to constantly tweak and improve.
  • Acceleration – acceleration of the revenue engine is about deploying adequate resource at the right time to enable scalability and continuous identification of new market opportunities and sales/marketing growth hacks.

When planning how to accelerate your revenue engine, it helps to break acceleration objectives into three groups, then prioritise tactical ideas in each group into a series of experiments:

  • Business initiatives
  • Market initiatives
  • Data initiatives

Business Initiatives for Revenue Management

Product or service led enhancements or new developments based on internal and client feedback.

  • Product or service enhancements – based on customer feedback that increase customer retention and attract new prospects
  • Pricing strategy – reviewing your pricing strategy is always a good starting point when looking for new areas for revenue growth without investing more. Identifying opportunities for lower level recurring revenue that can be scaled, or increasing the baseline cost of your product or service as long as it reflects valuable additions to customer service or product quality?
  • Package strategy – do you have services you could productise, re-emphasising the specific problem the service solves and rebranding it as an off the shelf option?

Market Initiatives for Revenue Management

Macro opportunities to expand your organisation and take market share.

  • New markets – opportunities to penetrate new markets or shape new product or service offerings for the markets you’re currently operating in?
  • Competitor weakness – are there any areas of competitor products or service that aren’t delivering as well as yours, or a gap that isn’t yet being filled?

Data Initiatives for Revenue Management

We all bang the drum of the importance of data driven decision making across marketing, sales and customer services, there are thousands of ways you could actionably analyse your data, but here are a few ideas to get you started.

  • Marketing – increasing conversion rate of inbound leads might involve assessing historic data, looking at the attributes of an inbound lead that are common to high conversion and conversely, those common to low conversion. Using this data, remap the lead scoring process and test.
  • Sales – by using historic purchase data from the client base, you could improve sales conversion by in depth assessment of the type of clients that purchase different products/services, narrowing the current client/prospect base down to those with a high propensity to purchase, wasting less time and increasing cross sell revenue.
  • Customer services – using data to increase customer retention by analysing customer sets who have a high propensity to cancel or leave, accurately predicting customer attrition well in advance of renewal date so action can be taken.

Once you’ve gathered a list of tactical ideas across each area, develop a priority list and create cross functional teams for the delivery of each revenue tactic.  The critical success factor for all the objectives will be experimentation and iteration. Holding weekly sprint meetings that require actionable feedback will help hold each team to account, and it will ensure momentum isn’t lost to other responsibilities.  

If you’d like to talk more about accelerating your revenue engine get in touch or read more about the role of Chief Revenue Officers and Revenue Engines below: