Author: Jay Mitchell



The good, bad and misleading revenue growth

January 10, 2019
Jay Mitchell

It is always best to be striving for revenue growth. That seems obvious, yet there are times when the marketplace is not ripe for growth — and other times when it is and leadership is getting in its own way.

The following are anecdotes of good, bad and misleading periods of revenue growth. Read them and decide — which narrative arc does your company fit right now?

A tale of good revenue growth.

Company A wanted to accelerate revenue growth but it was relying on antiquated market positioning (spend management), while also lacking consistency in sales process and the support required to develop and enable a global sales organization on a new go-to-market platform. With Mereo’s help, Company A transformed itself. Rather than adding new sellers to feed revenue growth, Company A invested in its current sales team while simultaneously turning to marketing – for consistent, differentiated buyer-level messaging frameworks – and training for the new Cloud system. In just two years, its revenue growth skyrocketed from 3% to a CAGR of 11%.

A tale of bad revenue growth.

Company B was taking part in a merger of three other B2B organizations. Despite help from outside consultants, the merger was not well assimilated, which is a common channel to revenue growth. Rather than deciding from the get-go who would be in charge of merging all these positions and re-allocating employees, people ended up fighting for positions. There were no joint value propositions. There were no genuine cross-sells or upsells taken advantage of as a means of creating more value for clients. In the end, these three companies acted as if they had still maintained separate brands rather than product lines. And as a result, they lost revenue over time and shrunk.

A tale of misleading revenue growth.

In Company C’s case, they were doing all the right things but the macroeconomics at the time did not support revenue growth. Go back in time with me to the 2008 recession. Company C was among many other businesses at the time that were experiencing a revenue lull. Yet, this lack of growth was not necessarily a bad thing because the market was shrinking, therefore Company C was in fact still growing faster than the marketplace.

revenue performance report infographic

 

Similarly, in recent years (see 2016-17 infographic above) the prevailing trend is that earnings are growing but the top line is not; essentially companies are cutting their way to profitability growth. The opportunity for revenue growth exists, but an unwillingness to invest is hampering the company – despite the profit growth displayed in the financials

If you would like to explore ways your company can be experience good, healthy revenue growth, look to the Mereo Growth Solutions to learn more.

GROWTH SOLUTIONS

 



3 ways your B2B can experience healthy revenue growth in 2019

January 3, 2019
Jay Mitchell

What do almost all companies — B2B or B2C — share in common? This is not a trick question. They all want healthy revenue growth.

Yet growth for the sake of growth is not always wise. Revenue growth has to translate down to the bottom line — so leadership must be smart and strategic about how to achieve growth.

The following are three strategies we have seen our clients’ leadership employ in the last year to achieve sustainable, healthy growth.

Cross-selling for revenue growth.

I am listing this revenue growth strategy first but cross-selling is often thought of last, if even at all. Do not let this strategy get lost in the shuffle. Look to your product and service portfolio. Look to your past buyers and clients. What solutions of yours have they found valuable in the past? Are there other solutions in your portfolio that could be an answer to their other needs? To their unspoken needs?

Some investment is likely necessary to analyze which cross-sells will be most-valuable for which clients. But that does not mean you have to double or triple marketing efforts or add a dozen new salespeople to your payroll. It may look something like marketing creates a thought leadership piece that tells the story of “clients who have found value out of product A are finding value in products E and G.” After all, according to Hubspot, salespeople are 60-70% more likely to sell to an existing customer than to a new prospect, so cross-selling is key.

Add, subtract or reshuffle salespeople for revenue growth.

A more common means of revenue growth is focusing on the sales team. We see many companies that make a goal of growing their sales by, say, 20%. So they add 10 new sales reps to achieve that growth.

In some cases, adding new salespeople may be appropriate. But maybe it is not 10 sellers — maybe it is seven. Maybe it is not adding a single salesperson but rather reshuffling the geographies where their current sales team is selling. Maybe your team has been selling to manufacturing companies in the Midwest but the market is changing, so instead of the three sales reps, you only need two there and can shift the third headcount to a different geography. Most of this strategy is rationalizing the investment in new salespeople and where they best can serve your markets and industries.

Mergers and acquisitions for revenue growth.

Unlike the previous two strategies, this growth is not organic. Taking advantage of mergers and acquisitions takes preparation, research and rationalization. Maybe there is a partner of your company that has an attractive revenue profile on which you could capitalize. Maybe it is a case where your company sells to CFOs and their company sells to CFOs, and if you acquire them you can go after the joint value proposition as well as capitalize on even more clear cross-selling opportunities (see above for more on that).

The takeaway here is that there are multiple ways to work toward a goal of healthy revenue growth, and these three examples are steadfast strategies for doing so. If your company could benefit from an outside perspective for exploring the best avenues for growth, contact me.

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sales kickoff

You led a great sales kickoff — now what?

December 20, 2018
Jay Mitchell

After you have planned a valuable and realistic sales kickoff that proved effective for rallying your salespeople around new ways to connect with the customer, you cannot lose the momentum throughout the rest of the year.

These three leadership principles can keep your salespeople’s skills sharp and strategies effective for engaging the customer throughout the whole year.

Accountability

According to a Harvard Business Review report, one out of every two leaders fails at accountability. I have shared in the past about how to hold your team accountable, and I want to extend it to sales kickoffs and beyond.

Once you instill new skills and concepts into your sales team and provide them with actionable goals to strive to meet, and everyone leaves the sales kickoff fueled up to go after it, to serve the customer — it is up to you, the leader, to make sure that same fire behind the eyes is glowing come June, come October. You need to follow-up and ensure your team absorbed key concepts and messaging.

Coaching

Along these same lines, learning is never once and done. It is a continuous journey – a lifetime for the most successful. Seek-out opportunities for sales exercises and role-plays, for training discussions and practice sessions on one-on-ones or ride-alongs.

The onus of coaching does not fall on you alone as the head of sales, but is should be provided by the organization. Empower your leadership team, and especially the front-line managers. Coach them to coach and take task off their plate that free them to invest more in the individuals on their team.

Reinforcement

Is the sales kickoff your only time you get your sales team together? Or do you have a cadence of sales meetings?

Many gather their sales teams, at least regionally, for quarterly or mid-year meetings that spans half a day to a day to ask questions like:

  • What are you doing to meet our overall objectives?
  • How did you perform this last quarter?
  • Have the concepts you learned in the sales kickoff stuck?

Learn more about how Mereo can help your sales team engage your customer in relevant conversations throughout the entire year.

SALES ENABLEMENT SOLUTIONS



The pitfall of the wandering salesperson

December 13, 2018
Jay Mitchell

If you are a salesperson and your organization provides you with a hammer for a product, it is obvious that you need customers who have nails.

But knowing your customer must have nails is not enough.

Without any more data or insight, you will go searching for your customer blindly, and to often find the first houses you approach have screws, not nails. These prospects need a screwdriver, not a hammer.

This is not your buyer. You have just wasted your time and this prospect’s time. And you have missed opportunities with customers who have nails and who are finding alternative solutions without yours, even if that means taking the back of a screwdriver to pound their nails into the wall.

When you do find customers with nails, without the right messaging, you may lose them to another hammer provider. You try selling them the hammer by acknowledging they have nails, but you ignore the picture frames they wish to see hanging on their walls. You disregard the feeling of accomplishment and satisfaction when your prospect has used the hammer to nail the décor on the walls that his or her spouse has been after them to hang for some time now. The hammer is not what they are buying. Your message must acknowledge what it is they are after.

Salespeople cannot provide value until they know who they are serving and the best way they can serve them. It is as simple — and yet complex — as that.

THE TARGET MARKET POWER PROFILE



Planning for an effective sales kickoff during your busiest time of year

December 6, 2018
Jay Mitchell

If you are not planning for your sales kickoff at least six months in advance, you are already behind schedule.

As the head of sales, it is your meeting – you set the agenda, theme and tone of the entire sales kickoff. While you may look to others for recommendations for what to include — “We’re rolling out this marketing campaign,” “We acquired a new company,” “We have this product launch” — as the CSO you determine the most-relevant and most-valuable content and the amount of time to spend on that content.

The tricky part that comes into play here is that virtually every company sells more in the fourth quarter than the rest of the year, often bringing in a third of their entire business in the fourth quarter – the seasonality spike. As a result, sales leadership is helping their team land sales, not plan a meeting for the next year. And an effective sales kickoff requires a lot of preparation.

Head of sales help.

When you are too busy meeting goals for the current year to plan for a sales kickoff for the next year, it is time to turn to other teams and even outside help.

Marketing and product teams can take on some heavy lifting. Alternatively, a third-party partner can be of assistance too – for example we support clients with dozens of sales kickoffs each year. The event team (often in marketing) can help with logistics and other components of the program. But the content – the strategy in particular – is the responsibility of the head of sales, as other parties can be assigned piecemeal content to support key elements in the sales kickoff agenda.

Regardless who you bring in to help, it is important to sit down with other leadership involved and provide your key thoughts and focused messaging to them before they start planning out the content and format of the event.

Establish key messages.

When you are establishing key messages with your sales kickoff team, ask yourself: What do I need to equip my sales team with in order for them to be the most successful in engaging prospects and customers?

This could be educating the sales team on a new product, getting more comfortable with buyer audiences and what matters to those audiences. It could also be that your company is in a time of transformation – undertaking an acquisition spree, for example – so the sales team must be able to communicate the CEO’s vision and instill confidence in the buyer that the organization has a plan to continue to expand its business.

Regardless the messages, the sales kickoff is a sales meeting. While many messages can be discussed during the sales meeting, they should be discussed in the context of what the sales plan is for next year.

If planning for this year’s sales kickoff has you stressed out already for next year’s, talk to us now about how we can help.

LET’S PLAN AHEAD

sales kickoff

The best case scenario sales kickoff

November 29, 2018
Jay Mitchell

The best sales kickoffs are oriented around one simple and powerful objective: enabling salespeople to engage more effectively with the customer.

Too often, sales kickoffs get hijacked by marketing or product teams. This is an event where these teams can interface with all of sales once a year — and the result, many times, is an over-eagerness to overload sales with as much information as possible while they have their eyes and ears and can lock them in a windowless room to data dump.

While the CEO, the CPO and the CMO all can and often do contribute to the sales kickoff meeting, this is a sales meeting. It belongs to the head of sales. And everything discussed, shared, rallied around, practiced should be done so in the context of how it relates to and enables sales to better connect with the customer.

So if the sales kickoff is not a time for marketing and product takeover, what is the most successful formula?

Celebrate last year’s successes, but move on to creating future success.

If your sales team did great last year, certainly spend a couple hours giving one another high fives. Take this time to look at what worked and what did not work. And after those two hours expire, move on to the plan for the next year — how you, the head of sales, will lead your salespeople to execute the customer strategy in a new way or perhaps scale efforts.

Limit content to maximize value.

If your marketing department has 18 pieces of content to share with the sales team, and you know you have the capacity to take on six of those content pieces (and honestly, no sales kickoff affords the capacity for 18 pieces of content anyway), then cover the most valuable six.

Take those pieces of content and allow your sellers to focus on them, to learn them really well and to get really good at them. Coming out of the sales kickoff, you want sales to leverage tools that will help them communicate the content with the customer, so embed exercises in the agenda for sales to practice applying the content to customer scenarios through role-plays.

And what about those other 12 pieces of content? They can be introduced at a later date or at quarterly business review-type meetings. There is time. But your team cannot master 18 pieces of content in a three-day span. So why set them up to fail? Give them the assets that matter and that you want them to get after now.

Practice, practice, practice.

The majority of the sales kickoff meeting should be spent practicing. The goal, as a reminder, is to enable your salespeople with more effective ways to engage the customer.

Provide them the relevant content that communicates compelling messages — and then help them put it all into practice through exercises and role-plays.

If you or your head of sales is looking for help planning next year’s sales kickoff, please contact me to learn how we can ensure your sales kickoff is as effective as possible.

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Top Sales Magazine Article

{Top Sales World Article} How One Company’s Disciplined, Targeted Approach to Demand Generation Delivered Big Results

October 1, 2018
Jay Mitchell

By Steve Maegdlin and Jay Mitchell

All leadership says the same thing to their salespeople: “We want you to be successful.” Because when salespeople are successful, a company realizes that success through predictable revenue streams and increased profits.

Leaders want to help their salespeople achieve goals but many leaders either don’t invest enough time up front or they don’t know how to do so in a manner that will pave the way for the most success.

Let’s flash back almost two decades now. JD Edwards, then one of the top three or four providers of enterprise software, was reaching a critical juncture. The previous 18 months had seen investments in lead generation stop, all existing leads dry up and revenue drop by $200M. Something needed to change.

Through what we labeled the “Revenue Delivery System,” JD Edwards sales and marketing leadership invested in a strategic approach to drive demand generation and equip the sales team to effectively sell to targeted markets.

Market Segmentation and Past Sales Success Laid a Framework for Demand Generation

The intersection of where the company had success and where the market was headed determined where JD Edwards wanted to focus product investment, demand generation and sales enablement.

Led by the product and industry marketing teams, we ranked these two elements:

  1. Where have we had success in the past? (What products into what industries/market segments in what geographies?)
  2. Where are specific market segments headed, and where can we dominate (or at least win more than our fair share)?

The challenge we (and many businesses) had was falling into the trap of “sell anything you can to anyone” (and assume sales will continue to grow). The analogy we used was fishing. You can troll the lake hoping something bites, or you can fish in the part of the lake where the fish like your bait. The first fisherman goes hungry; the second succeeds.

The same holds true for sales. Just because you sold it once — good salespeople can sell anything once — does not mean you can sell it again. And in the software business, once you sell it once, your operational cost for building and maintaining the features that the otherwise untargeted customer in that untargeted industry requires is expensive — very expensive.

Also, it is important to focus your sales and marketing teams on generating leads and selling to customers in specific regions, in specific industry segments within those regions, and with problems your products specifically solve. For example, if you live in Houston, you are better served to invest most of your time generating leads and selling in the oil and gas industry, not consumer package goods.

Sales and Marketing Alignment

Once we understood our markets, industries and geographies — and the competitive advantage we had in each — we got busy implementing an aggressive demand generation program.

We used a simple three-step process to help integrate sales and marketing:

  1. Marketing created demand around targeted customer pain points to generate interest in our offering
  2. Marketing qualified leads through a lead-nurture process to make sure it was real and worth our sellers’ time
  3. Sales reviewed each lead and turned it into a sales-qualified lead, subsequently adding the lead into their pipeline commitment

Once sales learned that marketing were highly targeting customers and were pre-qualifying leads to ensure it was worth their time — they got on board.

Three months after implementing the Revenue Delivery System, sales converted 54% of marketing leads to sales qualified leads, meaning they believed the lead was good enough to put in their pipeline. The 54% is beyond industry best practice, which at the time hovered around 15% to 20%.

Read more at Top Sales Magazine. 

 

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CRO

3 Steps a CRO can take to strengthen their company’s revenue sustainability

September 20, 2018
Jay Mitchell

As the chief revenue officer, your main focus is, not surprisingly, the company’s revenue. This singular focus, though, means you must cast your attention across all departments, all teams, all employees’ actions and help shape these moving pieces into a structure of sustainable revenue performance.

The following are three tips to manage your company’s efforts to reach your revenue goals.

Keep a Pulse on the Marketplace

While most other employees focus on their performance and their day-to-day, you must look to the marketplace — past, present and future. Work with your product team to help them understand what is working and what is not working with current offerings in the marketplace. Bring not only data points from the marketplace to product and marketing teams but partner with them to shape the go-to-market strategy accordingly. What differentiation do you have or lack? Be the lighthouse of competitive intelligence, and warn any product ships that are in danger of sinking the company.

Develop the Right Framework for Them to Execute

Revenue performance is not only about growing revenues. Revenue performance is about a perpetual engine that generates profitable revenue for the long haul. For some companies, big growth is the most important revenue metric. For others it is margins. Whatever the measurements of revenue performance applicable for your situation, it is predicated on a framework that includes the right balance at the time of demand progression, solution marketing, solution management, sales operations and sales enablement. All five of these operational disciplines work in tandem with one another when revenue performance is sustainable. These operational disciplines bring together sales, marketing, solution/product, service, finance, human resources and other functional disciplines of the organization to work with one another toward a common objective. As the CRO, the blueprint of sustainable revenue performance requires all five operational disciplines.

Establish the Right Governance Structure

As a chief revenue officer, you have your eyes on all parts of the business and your hands in most if not all of the strategy. While your onus is to lead, you also need to develop a structure around you with the other leadership and employees that will build your company up for sustainable revenue performance.

Your teams are important here. You must be transparent and honest with all members, sharing goals and metrics regularly, if you expect them to reach those goals and react to those metrics. And you must hold your teams accountable, and yourself accountable to your teams. By doing so, the outcome of your company’s revenue performance does not lie solely with you, which would be a formula for failure; it becomes every employee’s responsibility, one they can step up to and achieve.

You set the mark, and they rise up to it under your encouragement.

 

If you or your company’s CRO could use help developing the right structure and framework that pave the way for sustainable revenue performance, contact us to get started.

 

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chief revenue officer

The overlooked value of the chief revenue officer

September 6, 2018
Jay Mitchell

In today’s market, a chief revenue officer (CRO) is critical to maximizing revenue across all areas of a business. But how is this leadership role different from the others?

The chief revenue officer leads — not manages.

The chief revenue officer is surrounded by mid-level or front-line managers who get the work done. This is not the onus of the CRO. The CRO is leading these managers and the rest of the organization to greater opportunities, to more-sustainable revenue performance. They ask, “What can we accomplish?” and then strategize on how to reach these feasible goals. The CRO has a willingness to think big, balanced by a realistic outlook of what can be accomplished with available resources.

The chief revenue officer provides a vision.

Your CRO does not sit in a corner office all day. They work with operational teams on sales governance, keeping a pulse on the current situation, the accounts and the pipelines. As a leader, they have tools in place and a cadence of review to measure if the numbers are leading to the goal. They connect with employees and encourage teams with a vision for the future of the company — and clearly share that vision with all the teams who will manage the details of that vision.

The chief revenue officer completes the c-suite team.

The CRO is not the end-all for revenue performance — they are one of a team of leaders. They work with the CEO and the rest of the executive team to ensure actions and efforts are coming together to meet revenue goals. Because revenue performance is more than just selling to find success.

If your company could benefit from a chief revenue officer but is hard-pressed to find the right person for the job, contact us to learn more about the Office of the CRO.

 

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Accountable

3 Steps to holding your team accountable

August 9, 2018
Jay Mitchell

We have discussed why it is important to hold your team accountable, but what does this really look like? Is it breathing over their backs and checking in on every single thing they should be doing – some may call this “micro-managing”? Is it providing clear guidelines and letting them run with them?

Here is our three-step strategy — applicable across businesses — for holding your team accountable.

  1. Create and establish goals.

    Your teams need to be aligned with strategic direction and goals. If goals never exist, there is nothing with which you can measure efforts and performance, nor anything unifying your people to rally around.

    Goals or key performance indicators (KPIs) need to tie to strategic direction and plans. Sales goals are easy because they tend to associate with a revenue marker – for example, new logo revenues, cross-sell/up-sell revenues, win rate and gross margin. Marketing goals are harder to determine, but if you think through the things you can measure, you can build out goals to work toward – for example, pipeline contribution and lead conversion ratios. Your product team can focus on quality and customer feedback, determining goals based on those factors.

  2. Develop a system of measurement.

    Goals mean little without a system of measurement. The next step to accountability is developing a strategy for measuring efforts. Things to keep in mind: Is it a laborious task to measure your goal? Do you need to hire more people in order to keep a pulse on the data and metrics? What is your cadence of measurement? Are these metrics worth measuring — are they propelling you forward and making a real impact?

    When business leaders do not consider how they will measure goals, they already are losing their handle on accountability. Goals that go unchecked are goals that go unachieved. As the old saying goes: “Do not expect what you do not inspect.”

  3. Read between the lines.

    Once you establish the numbers you want your teams to reach and how you will keep an eye on those numbers, you must ask yourself: What do the numbers truly mean? How will you as a leader respond to these numbers?

    For metrics to mean anything, leaders should strive to find context. Ask your teams questions. Find out why something worked or why something is failing to work. Determine with you team what the impact is (upside or downside) of hitting the mark. As you have these conversations, you will be better informed to make decisions that will have a real impact on your revenue performance.

If you are interested in diving deeper into a strategy for accountability, let us connect and discuss your specific needs further

 

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