The focus for Revenue Operations is aligning and optimizing revenue-generating functions to achieve business objectives. This strategic function helps align and optimize the activities of sales, marketing, and customer success teams to drive revenue growth.
The cost of a website is a bit like the cost of a car. You can spend $5,000 for a ‘get around town’ car, $75,000 for a luxury vehicle, or millions for a transportation fleet! With today’s open-source platforms like WordPress and with a vast array of design templates, a business can deploy a professional responsive website for $10,000-$20,000. With professional help and custom design elements, a site can cost more of course. A website is so vital, I think most companies should invest more into the design and ongoing management of a website.
The Financial Advisor SMART BOOK™ outlines the Revenue Architecture Methodology that financial advisors can use to add structure and predictability to their revenue engine. We introduce nine steps and advisor-specific marketing and sales strategies that are helping advisors capture client value.
The comprehensive guide helps independent financial advisors build a strategy-led, systematic growth program with 9 proven strategies. The goal is to help advisors:
Having a vision and game plan for growth is essential for financial advisors to thrive in a challenging marketplace. The Smart Book™ outlines how you can achieve more predictable and sustainable revenue growth by establishing a Revenue Architecture that fits your firm. The key is to commit to a systematic sales and marketing process by following the 9 proven strategies to guide your approach.
There are many different perspectives and philosophies on persona development. This makes sense, as they’re the most critical element of creating messaging and informing Message Maps™…then identifying and developing content aligned with the buy cycle…and ultimately validating the various components of a true buyer engagement strategy. In the end, persona development should be defined by how it’ll be used – in terms of purpose and context that will drive messaging, and ultimately content strategy. Other marketers will use it more as a “playbook” of all possible or available buyer insights. I’m not saying either is right or wrong, but it’s why we’ve created a new category called Engagement Personas™.
Accelerated, predictable, and sustainable revenue growth requires a company-wide commitment. When developing a marketing plan, consider these questions. These can help you develop your Revenue Architecture and expand your revenue performance potential.
The 9 dimensions take a broad view of revenue growth dimensions and help you focus your sales and marketing planning.
Face it, buyers don’t care whether they are interacting with your marketing or your sales organization, they follow their buying process – often in an unstructured and unpredictable way. They self-sell on the web, research with influencers, and engage 1:1 with salespeople. An effective buyer experience across a dynamic buyer’s lifecycle requires that your revenue architecture is designed with a coordinated closed-loop process supported by an integrated technology stack.
We read a lot about Martech and SalesTech stacks. This is understandable because marketing and sales teams have traditionally pursued distinct missions with different needs. Yet if your marketing, sales, and service “front office” needs to be more integrated to support dynamic buyer pathways, you might need to re-think your technology stack. An integrated revenue process supported by integrated revenue technology helps deliver a single view of the customer and becomes more responsive and relevant as your buyers jig and jag along their dynamic buying processes.
A company needs an effective go-to-market strategy that makes it easy to buy from and sell to. Go-to-market strategies and plans are a blueprint for how the company will reach customers, streamlining and establishing a strong focus on the steps that a company must take to co-create value with customers.
Although many marketers focus on increasing the number of leads, quite often marketers should be in fact aiming to have fewer leads. The key is that this smaller number of leads are Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs), who are genuine sales prospects, instead of people who are curious but have no intent to buy.
A Revenue Architecture defines the building blocks for Revenue growth. You can think of the Revenue Architecture as a Sales and Marketing Operating Model. It is critical that the revenue architecture is designed and deployed to directly align with the business strategy and business model.
In pursuit of greater margins (by moving to higher value products and services) or greater scale (by moving toward a more standardized products and bigger markets) a businesses will adjust strategy and business models. The diagram below depicts a simple set of axis that firms generally move along in their go-to-market approach.
Business Model Continuum
Recent focus on #ABM – Account Based Marketing – has spurred a lot of conversation about how ABM differs from Inbound Marketing. Our view is that these descriptive labels essentially are all attacking the same challenge of driving sustainable revenue growth. ABM is more focused on engaging, converting and expanding an account – a typical B2B sales and marketing challenge. Inbound Marketing is a more generic process of lead generation and lead conversion though an attraction principle – using content and permission marketing to attract leads (people) to your brand or website for nurture and sales conversion.
We focus on the concept of Revenue Architecture – a customized approach to align your business model with your revenue generation model and to unify the sales and marketing process.
Here are some ways that account based marketing and inbound marketing are different.