Creating a Roadmap to Sustainable Growth:

Revenue is the undisputed lifeblood of a company, yet its creation often goes unexamined. While it’s common for companies to perform comprehensive financial audits and operational, risk, and IT assessments, it’s rare for companies to assess their revenue creation activities in the same way. In reality, most companies manage their revenue generating efforts from a siloed, tactical perspective, which frequently results in underperformance. The Revenue Creation Health Check (RCHC) is designed to combat this, by providing a holistic evaluation of an organization’s revenue generating activities that can be used to identify opportunities for significant improvement.

What is a Revenue Creation Health Check?

A revenue creation health check is a systematic and comprehensive evaluation of an organization’s revenue-generating strategies, tactics, processes and systems across sales, marketing, and customer service. The goal is to leverage both holistic internal and external insights to identify areas for improvement, enhance revenue production, and drive sustainable growth. The four key components of an effective RCHC include:

1. Evaluation of Key Performance Indicators (KPI)

Evaluating revenue creation KPIs can be eye-opening in many different ways. They tell an undeniable story about the organization’s bottom-line performance. Plus, what is and isn’t being tracked can provide strong evidence of the organization’s operational maturity and what it holds most important. While the KPIs an organization chooses to track may vary with the specifics of their business and industry, standard best practice KPIs typically include:

• Cost of acquiring a new customer.
• Demand generation productivity.
• Web traffic and engagement.
• Conversion rates across all channels.
• Pipeline velocity across all channels.
• Customer lifetime value.
• Total revenue and per channel

2. Strategy and Tactics Validation

KPIs provide evidence as to the effectiveness of an organization’s revenue generating activities, but in and of themselves, do not validate the efficacy of its strategies and tactics nor the quality of execution. To accomplish this requires a series of interviews and observations across sales, marketing, and customer service. The goal is to validate if the organization’s strategies and tactics are being executed as designed, are effective and to determine what if any gaps need to be addressed to improve performance. Key questions to be answered include:

• Are the organization’s goals, strategies, and tactics well understood, down to the front-line employees?
• Is the company’s positioning and messaging aligned across all customer facing teams?
• How do customers view the company’s value proposition and customer experience?
• Are demand generation and sales activities well-coordinated and aligned?
• Is there an effective process in place to measure performance and adjust appropriately?

3. Revenue Operations and Execution

Revenue operations and execution are where the rubber meets the road. It’s well understood that an organization’s strategy is only as good as its ability to execute it. Still, it’s not uncommon for operational processes and systems to hinder performance. The goal here is to ensure that the processes and systems necessary for sales, marketing, and customer service to operate efficiently and effectively are in place and are integrated across all three groups. Key questions to be answered include:

• Does the organization’s CRM provide a 360° view of customer information, interactions and behaviors and promote timely and effective decision making?
• Are sales, marketing and customer service required to use multiple systems and manual processes to serve customers?
• Is the process to quote, close, and fulfill business efficient and transparent?
• Do customers complain about a lack of data and information integration across various touchpoints?
• How does the organization engage customers post-sale to encourage repeat business and referrals?
• Are sales, marketing, and customer service performance metrics and compensation aligned and achievable?

4. Revenue Creation Improvement Roadmap

RCHCs often uncover a wealth of new insights, and thus it can be daunting to convert them into an actionable plan for improvement. It’s important to first consider how what you’ve learned has been impacting your customers and success. Then, you can quantify the benefits of the recommended improvements. Armed with these conclusions, the estimated ROI associated with each improvement and the expected effort to implement them will provide you with all the information necessary to prioritize your efforts.

The biggest challenge is always in the execution. You’re headed for disappointment if you expect your sales, marketing, and customer service leaders to execute your Revenue Creation Improvement Roadmap without oversight and project rigor. Cross-functional initiatives always require disciplined program management and oversight to be successful, and to maintain sustainable results.

An effective Revenue Creation Improvement Roadmap should include:

• An Executive Summary of the health check’s findings and recommendations.
• A list of recommended improvements prioritized based on anticipated level of positive impact, estimated ROI, and the expected level of effort to implement.
• A project plan, complete with scope, timelines, resourcing, milestones, and risk management.
• Status reporting that measures progress and creates accountability across all key stakeholders.

Summary

Shifting from a siloed to a holistic perspective on revenue creation yields substantial benefits. The RCHC can be the catalyst for enabling tighter alignment and integration across your revenue generating functions, while uncovering tangible opportunities for improved revenue production.

We help clients maximize revenue via improved sales, marketing and operational performance, alignment, and integration.

If you’re ready to explore growth opportunities for your business, let’s connect and brainstorm together.