Every year there is that time when we are conflicted on focus.
There is a belief that as we approach Q4 all we have to do is push, try harder, focus or get smarter to finish strong and save the year.
The question that creates conflict is do we do a Revenue Strategy for the new year now or will that just dilute Q4?
This needs a closer review. “Revenue Science™” tells us control what we can and track everything we can’t and manage the relationship between the two. We have control over the value we bring to the market, how we deliver that value and to who. We control our allocation of resources (marketing, selling, technology, investment and tools) to support the delivery of that value. We don’t control the economy, our customer’s business, government or the chaos and change all around us.
For this belief to be valid it must be true that we can just decide to turn up the jets and more sales and profitable revenue appear. That seems to say that to this point our approach has been lazy, random, unaligned, and we have not focused our resources on the outcomes we wanted to achieve.
The implications are we either were doing our best work with great resource allocation up to now and the idea of turning up the jets is pure politics. Or we weren’t doing our best aligned work and resource allocation was questionable so now we have decided to do a good job for a Q4 bonuses?
It is too late! Neither of these will assure a year saving Q4. So take the time to build a real science based Revenue Strategy for the new year and hope for Q4.