Who doesn’t want “more profitable sales”? As the world gets more complex, as buyers and sellers find the speed of everything accelerating and the information available so immense that sorting through it is a task in itself, “more profitable sales” becomes a challenge on many fronts.
When we say “more,” do we mean more of the exact same thing we sold last year or “more” total sales (a little of last year’s stuff, some new stuff, some new service and some reoccurring stuff)? When we say profitable, do we mean we get more margin for the same stuff or do we mean we are selling “more” $ of stuff with less margin so we grow the bottom line a little or do we mean we sold less stuff with less margin, but we cut a lot of expense, and now sales (even if smaller with smaller margin) are more profitable?
When we dream of “more profitable sales,” is that like the dream of a spring with beautiful flowers as far as the eye can see in Death Valley? Because if those two are alike, we are hoping our market enters a buyer-frenzied bubble, and Death Valley gets a LOT of late winter rain.
The alternative to surrendering to complexity, hoping for “more” of something your boss values and praying for rain or a market bubble is an intentional RoadMap to Manufacture more profitable sales based on applying Revenue Science™. When you have an intentional RoadMap, you will be able to make intentional changes to anything you control along that RoadMap to increase or decrease select outcomes to more fully monetize your goals.
When this gets broken down, there are five things you have control over regardless what is going on around you:
- Do you have a Revenue RoadMap that includes the three fundamental elements, Marketing, Selling and Delivering, and the alignment between them?
- Does each of the fundamental elements have operational / behavioral outcomes that become inputs for the following element?
- Is there a continuous improvement process backed by metrics and best practices where each fundamental element supports the element before it to improve their outputs and to increase total Revenue RoadMap top-line and bottom-line results?
- Are there metrics for measuring alignment of the fundamental elements to the revenue strategy and to the various elements’ inputs and outputs?
- Are all investments (people, money, time, etc.) measured for the degree of leverage (positive or negative) they provide in one or more of the fundamental element’s outcomes?
When this is managed by the elements across the RoadMap, we avoid the silo turf wars. We don’t care about anyone’s title or department. We only care if all elements are being deployed in an aligned way across the RoadMap. When they are being performed in an aligned way, we can improve each one for the purpose of improving the whole RoadMap. This is called balancing the RoadMap.
A marketing group that produces way too many of the wrong leads is hurting selling, wasting money and confusing the market. Sales people who sell too many or the wrong deals harm the delivery process and create bad messages in the market. When delivery organizations are not on time or on budget, they make sales unprofitable and ruin referral / follow-on business. All of these are examples of a lack of balance, and since we can control them all – shame on us.
A science-based Revenue RoadMap is attainable for all willing to do a little work, and once in place, it begs to be continuously improved. The humans traveling the RoadMap (your staff, customers, partners or the general market) are thrilled. For the first time, they are ALL on the same road to achieve the same strategic outcome, and they will win together.