Those schooled in “Revenue Science™” use The BellCurve as a daily or at least weekly diagnostic tool.  A BellCurve view lights up good business, partners, and staff as clear as a bright summer morning.  At the same time, it identifies those who will never pay for your value or partner in ways to advance your short-term revenue or long-term brand.

Individuals and organizations that practice a “Revenue Science™” discipline use the BellCurve every day look at how they are applying resources and where to predict the profitable growth.

The BellCurve makes decisions about new offers, new hires, and marketing investments simpler to make and deploy.

Yet those same people who use the BellCurve to triage opportunities and challenges often miss one of the most important uses – predicting the future.

When you place your brand on the curve and compare it to your ideal customer, your niches to dominate, your offers to the market, your partners and key staff you get a powerful picture of today.  Those things that are within one track of your brand have a low “Cost of Chaos” and a high integrity score from your customers and suspects view.  Those things outside of one track from your brand have a high “Cost of Chaos” and are throttling your growth.

This is a powerful way to manage and continuously improve your daily deployment, but there is a whole other way to use the BellCurve.

As you are looking out beyond the short-term over the next two or three years use the same lenses to plot the unavoidable changes.

Everything on the curve will move from left to right based on several things, with the most important being your market is getting smarter every day.  Remember on the left side of the BellCurve you sell mostly brain to your buyer.  You know something your ideal customer does not know.  You solve a problem for them they can’t solve without you.  You get paid for that problem-solving value and make a lot of money.

The more you solve “the same problem,” the more people learn from you, the more sharing goes on and others add to what you have delivered to your customer and create expanded solutions to that original problem (you have created competition).

As the market gets smarter you get paid less.  The value of your brain is diminished since the market knows your secrets and there are others with those expanded solutions who have a lower cost structure and charge less.

Looking beyond the short-term these changes are predictable, so you better begin changing to avoid a time when you can’t or don’t want to compete with the same offers.  You can keep increasing your value through innovation, a combination of products and services, new solutions to larger customer problems or a value-driven business/engagement model.  But you must do something.

The people you have today may be wrong for the future.  Almost certainly the way you market, sell, contract and price will need to change.  Very few companies can start on the left side of the curve and plot a successful course to track five and be happy throughout the journey.  Don’t be afraid to consider selling off a division, licensing your Intellectual Property, or partnering with someone who dominates in niches more than a track from your brand.

Your Revenue Strategy will tell you what you must do – use the BellCurve to help you plot the next three years in an intentional way based on that Revenue Strategy.

Before you do any other planning look at the reality of what is going to happen and then proactively make that reality your unfair advantage for the future.