5 Revenue Growth Innovations For 2020
By Robert Jurkowski, On Demand Advisors
To help you dramatically scale and grow your revenue in 2020, I will introduce you to 5 Revenue Growth Innovations for 2020 to scale and grow your revenue based on our experience with over 300 B2B companies and breakthrough innovations as a Revenue Growth Agency. You will be excited to apply these innovations at your company and I will be offering follow up webinars that present in detail how you apply each revenue growth innovations and software and cloud companies that are already benefiting in practice.
The Corporate Executive Board states that 57 percent of your sales cycle is already completed by the time the prospect connects with your sales executive. Imagine that. This means that your sales cycle started when your prospect visited your website or learned about your company.
Your revenue creation process is a connected process that your company needs to master. It starts with your brand and demand creation. It continues when interested buyers are engaged correctly in their discovery process and are given the tools and rationale to engage with your company. It continues when your sales team has all of the necessary tools to convert buyers into customers. All of your marketing, lead qualification and sales resources are aligned with your buyer and their buying process.
Now let’s evaluate each Revenue Growth Innovation for 2020 in detail.
- Build The Quantity Of Sales Opportunities To Exceed Your Revenue Goal
Let’s walk through a model together about how you can build the quantity of sales opportunities that you will need in 2020. You can build this model for new customer acquisition, build by industry such as Financial Services, Healthcare and Government, build by geography such as the Americas, EMEA and Asia Pac, build by product or service line such as accounting solutions, CRM solutions and supply chain management solutions, build by type of company including enterprise, mid-market and emerging or build by new customer acquisition, upsell to current customers and new product or service introduction.
If you want to add another $5 million revenue through new client acquisition and your average transaction or annual subscription is $50,000 you will need to add 100 new customers in 2020. Everyone knows their conversion rate in their sale funnel so if your conversion rate in 25 percent you will need 400 new sales opportunities in 2020. For most B2B companies the conversion rate for a market qualified lead (someone expressing interest in your products or services) is 10 percent so you will need 4000 market qualified leads to convert into 400 sales opportunities in 2020.
In order to stay on track and achieve your $5 million revenue goal you will need to create 333 market qualified leads every month, convert your market qualified leads into 33 sales opportunities every month and convert your sales opportunities into 8 new customers every month. You will need to put in place your demand generation engine so that you can achieve this predictable and consistent revenue growth every month, quarter and year. In our upcoming webinar on January 15, 2020 we will provide you with the specific steps to put your Demand Generation Engine in place; the link for this webinar is https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/5867809187788771341
Finally in this section you have an opportunity to deploy a winning strategy instead of a competing strategy. With a winning strategy you build a plan to reach 100 percent of your target audience so that every decision maker knows your company and appreciates your value propositions and how you can contribute to their success.
- Gain Buyer Intelligence To Increase The Quality Of Every Sales Opportunity
What if you knew what was important to every decision maker about your solutions and services before you engaged with them? What if you provided every decision maker the exact information that they wanted so that they were educated and engaged before you began your first conversation with them?
Most of us infer what we believe our target audience wants from us; this often comes from sales opportunities, executive conversations or industry or analyst reports. This leads to making educated guesses and making invalidated financial bests.
Instead you need a statistically valid way to engage 50, 100 or more target decision makers to validate all of your assumptions, answer all of your questions, rank all of your value propositions and tell you how they want to buy. We call this buyer intelligence which begins with a rigorous market survey, followed by analysis, followed by the distillation and prioritization of messaging based on feedback from your buying audience.
When I met the CEO of a cloud applications company that had sold into one industry for 12 years we decided to survey his current target audience and rank their top 20 value propositions; the two value propositions that ranked the lowest were the two that they were using when we began our engagement. By changing their branding and messaging using buyer intelligence and growing their lead volume 10-fold they were able to grow from $6.5 million to $65 million in annual revenue over 4 years.
How do you conduct your own buyer intelligence to determine the best and most potent branding and messaging that will help propel your revenue growth for 2020?
Let’s review a recent example, how the survey was constructed, how the results were analyzed and how the new messaging was applied in every area including messaging on their website, use with their sales conversation and prioritization of their demand generation campaigns; join us for this webinar “Gain Buyer Intelligence to Increase the Quality of Every Sales Opportunity” on January 23, 2020, by registering at this https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7397921454839480588
Armed with buyer intelligence, you also can create a Buyer’s Guide to help your target audience determine what should be important criteria when they decide to investigate and evaluate your type of offering. Your Buyer’s Guide helps simplify the evaluation and decision-making process for your buyer.
- Accelerate Your Sales Cycle
The first two revenue growth innovations were focused on creating the quantity and quality of your sales opportunities. Now let’s discuss three ways that you can dramatically accelerate your sales cycle because velocity matters more than ever in 2020.
Transform to a Sales-Driven Website
When anyone hears about your services or company they are going to visit your website. Does your website convert visitors into prospects? If 57 percent of your sales cycle is already completed by the time a prospect engages with your sales executive, you need a better way to engage and influence your audience early in the sales process. Most websites tell but do not sell. Instead, migrate from an information website to a sales-driven website that educates and guides every visitor through the buying process.
Just like in real estate, seeing is believing so it would be beneficial to see how this type of website begins by mapping the buying process for each audience and persona and providing the information and offers that are tailored for each audience. On February 5, 2020 we will conduct a webinar “How Your Sales Driven Website Will Significantly Accelerate Your Sales” and walk through several production examples. To learn more or register the webinar link is https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/1229729392757984525
Engage Earlier in the Sales Cycle
We worked with a UI/CX design firm and asked what their audience wanted. The CEO shared with us that every prospect wanted to benchmark their UI against best practices or compare their UI against their competitors; we created an assessment that they could position early in the sales process to engage their audience is a meaningful way. This helped them accelerate their sales cycle and you could create a similar diagnostic offering or assessment that could do the same for your company.
Eliminate the “Do Nothing Competitor”
For many companies their main competition is “do nothing”; you have gone through a long and expensive sales cycle that ends with no decision or purchase. We have found that the main obstacle to making a purchase decision is that the perceived risk is too high. One way to lower risk is to provide relevant and ROI-based customer success stories. Another way to lower risk is to provide a ROI justification beyond cost reductions.
- Improve The Accuracy Of Your Sales Forecast
For many companies, many of the forecasted sales that were anticipated to close move from one quarter to the next. This makes it difficult for the CEOs and Sales Leaders to “handicap” the forecast based on historical precedent. Let’s focus on the next revenue growth innovation for 2020 to improve the accuracy of your sales forecast. Here are two ways that you can implement immediately.
Move from Sales Activity to Buyer Accomplishment
When you review the steps in your sales process that you enforce with your CRM system, they are probably based on sales activity. This may include qualification, discovery, presentation, proposal, decision, contract signing or similar steps. The problem with this approach is when sales completes a step there needs to be buyer agreement before you can move to the next step. For example if your sales team provides a solution demonstration this may address the buyer’s questions or raise more questions that need to be addressed.
Create an Abundance of Sales Opportunities
We have all heard about the longest sales cycle in your company’s history. In most cases, the sales team treated the opportunity as if it was qualified but in fact in was not. The best way to ensure that your sales team does not dedicate resources and money into unqualified opportunities is to create an abundance of sales opportunities so that they can focus solely on the best qualified opportunities.
- Achieve Consistent Sales Performance Across Your Team
If you are like me, I have interviewed, trained and coached hundreds of sales executives and I still end up with “A” players that are extraordinary and exceed the anticipated goal, “B” players who are capable who may or may not deliver results and meet or exceed goal and “C” players that have been around too long. The goal is to enable your “A” players, upskill your “B” players and weed out your “C” players earlier.
The fifth revenue growth innovation for 2020 will help you achieve consistent sales performance across your sales team.
Move from Event-based to Continuous Learning
At the beginning of each sales year, it is typical to fly the entire sales team to Las Vegas for a four-day kickoff and sales meeting. The objective is to present the goals for the New Year and provide as much training and knowledge transfer as possible.
When you look at the amount of training, practicing and coaching that is required for peak sales performance, continuous learning is the only answer. If you lay out the year and what knowledge is be shared and verified through role playing you now have a plan to achieve consistency across your sales team.
In our upcoming webinar on Thursday, February 20, 2020 “Achieve Consistent Performance across Your Sales Team” we will discuss how you can implement your continuous learning program to upskill your current sales team for peak performance and onboard your new sales executives quickly. To learn more or register here is the link: https://attendee.gotowebinar.com/register/7829386310289165069.
Identify the areas where you have gaps in learning or performance
In addition, you have the opportunity to identify where you have gaps and what is the best way to address these gaps that prevent quota-busting performance. When I was the COO for a Lean Manufacturing Software company I realized that only a few executives in our company truly knew what constituted lean manufacturing principles; my goal was to extract this knowledge and get it shared and enforced across the entire sales team. I would expect that you have gaps in learning or performance that you want to address.
So let’s review these 5 revenue growth innovations for 2020. Armed with these innovative best practices and a detailed roadmap that you can apply from each webinar you will be ready to set your course for explosive revenue growth in 2020.
- Build the Quantity of Sales Opportunities to Exceed Your Revenue Goal
- Gain Buyer Intelligence to Increase the Quality of Every Sales Opportunity
- Accelerate Your Sales Cycle
- Improve the Accuracy of Your Sales Forecast
- Achieve Consistent Sales Performance across Your Team
About The Author
Robert Jurkowski is the CEO and founder for Revenue Growth Strategy, a revenue growth firm that partners with CEOs and Business Leaders to help them create and implement their revenue growth plan that is predictable, capital efficient, leverages best practices and gets results.
As an operating executive, he has built many successful software and cloud companies as CEO, COO and Chief Revenue Officer in Silicon Valley and understands what is needed to succeed as an operating executive and strategic leader.
As a revenue growth expert, he has collaborated with over 300 software, cloud, IoT and services companies to help them plan and implement revenue growth best practices to experience their desired outcomes.
If you would like to leverage proven revenue growth strategies for your company join us for one of the upcoming webinars to drill into your area of interest or contact Robert Jurkowski at 1-800-735-6520 or vial email at robert@revenuegrowthstategy.com to set up a meeting.