A lot of companies have challenges hitting their sales goals every month. They might be able to do it for a couple of months but then stumble or have one great month followed by one weak month. Sometimes the slow months turn into slow quarters or even a slow year.
There are a few ways to fight against this, but the best way is to install a system for revenue generation that ensures you have a repeatable, scalable and predictable revenue generation machine for your company.
If you think about it for a second, you have systems for almost every other area of your company. Why not have one for revenue?
Here are the 7.5 ways a revenue generation system almost guarantees you hit your sales goals.
1. Weekly Attention to Revenue-Related Issues
A revenue generation system should support regular rhythms that people and teams can count on. This takes the form of a weekly revenue team meeting.
This 90-minute meeting happens at the same time every week. Each revenue team meeting follows the same agenda every week.
Our revenue team meeting follows the L10 meeting format made popular by EOS®, so if you’re an EOS company, this is going to sound very familiar. If you’re not familiar with EOS, learn this format to drive revenue results.
Every meeting starts with a five-minute segue to get people to share one positive personal item and one positive professional item. This relaxes the team, helps people get to know each other and allows for a transition into this important meeting.
Next, spend five minutes reviewing your scorecard and data. If your scorecard elements are on track, keep moving. If you’re missing your numbers, perhaps it’s an issue that should be discussed later in the meeting.
Everyone on the team has rocks. These are large quarterly initiatives that people are assigned and responsible for completing. In five minutes, review the rocks and make sure the rock work is on track. If there are issues, you move them to the upcoming IDS (identify, discuss, solve) section for discussion.
After the scorecard review, spend five minutes on opportunities. Since this is the revenue team meeting, you should discuss any new revenue opportunities that are about to close. What can you do to get these new revenue opportunities over the finish line?
Having marketing, sales and customer service in these discussions means your company is now moving mountains, sharing ideas and getting creative on how to close your biggest and most important deals.
Every revenue team meeting has to-dos assigned to each participant. This five-minute section is to review the past to-dos and make sure they’ve been completed and there are no issues.
With 30 minutes behind you, now there’s a full hour for issues processing and progress around your biggest and most important challenges. For every issue that makes it into this section, spend a few minutes discussing the issue and asking clarifying questions so that everyone understands the nuances of the issue.
Next, talk about solutions to the issue. The goal of this section is not to just discuss but to solve the issues surfaced by the team. You should be processing and solving between three and seven issues every meeting.
If you do this well, think about the impact this team could make if they solve at least three issues every week. That’s 100+ issues processed and solved over a year. This is going to have a major impact on your ability to install a revenue generation system.
Finally, score the meeting. Everyone gives the meeting a score on a scale of 1 to 10. This helps you understand the effectiveness of these meetings and the progress the team is making as they learn this new meeting structure.
2. Tools To Help You Get Your Marketing on Track
Systems come with tools. Square 2’s Revenue Generation System (RGS™) comes with a huge inventory of tools (24 to be exact), including tools to create personas, map your prospects’ buyer journeys, build a new website, design your content calendar, plan your monthly marketing work, design your sales process and orchestrate new marketing campaigns.
Instead of working on these very important projects without any tools, now you have best-in-breed, proven materials to help you design and build much of the marketing you need to drive revenue.
3. Processes To Fill In the Gaps Around How You Work Now
Several proven processes are required to turn revenue generation into a system. Learning these is going to also make revenue and growth much more predictable.
For example, our Revenue Generation System teaches two specific processes that shouldn’t be skipped.
First, there’s a 30-day sprint planning session that allows your teams to review, discuss, prioritize and assign 30 days’ worth of work. A prioritization methodology is part of this important session, and it includes making sure the work that’s going to produce the desired results gets scheduled and assigned first.
When existing resources are fully allocated, you can move to outside resources if you’re prepared to invest additional money to get more work completed. This process also aligns perfectly with what you and your team can accomplish with the expected results.
The next major process improvement is what we call the 90-day strategy session. This allows your revenue team to always be perfectly aligned with leadership. During the session, review what your competition is doing, any upcoming strategic changes at your organization, new products or services under development and new differentiation features.
4. Alignment Between Marketing, Sales and Customer Service
Most companies still struggle to align marketing, sales and customer service. Some companies have moved marketing and sales together, but few have aligned all three.
This weekly revenue team meeting and some of the processes discussed above get everyone talking, working and thinking about revenue in a different, more unified way.
It’s one of the fastest and easiest ways to get this alignment set up and in practice quickly. As these three teams start working on issues together, focusing on the same numbers and applying a new way of thinking, your company is going to see a significant improvement. How can you not?
5. Access To Proven Methodologies for the Tactics and Campaigns You’re Executing
One of the biggest challenges for companies today is selecting the right tactics, executing the tactics successfully and designing campaigns to produce the desired results.
A system like this with tools designed to help with tactic selection and prioritization plus a campaign framework that supports omnichannel, highly orchestrated and personal campaigns make this entire process much easier to learn and execute month over month.
The result is going to be more leads and more highly qualified sales opportunities for the sales team.
6. Materials That Help You Understand Today’s Buyer Journey
One of the secrets to business results from marketing and sales investments is gaining a deep understanding of your prospects’ buyer journeys.
Unfortunately, you can’t use the traditional funnel most people talk about. Did you know this funnel was created in 1890? Yes, it’s over 120 years old. I don’t know about you, but I’m pretty sure people don’t buy like they did 120 years ago.
To deal with the new way people buy, you’re going to need a new buyer journey model, and RGS teaches people to use the Cyclonic Buyer Journey™ model. Not only does it teach this framework but there are tools that allow you to map out your specific prospect buyer journey.
This includes how prospects feel, questions they ask and resources that could help them to clearly create an experience that makes all your prospects feel like your company is the only option for them.
7. A Scorecard That Clearly Highlights What’s Working and What’s Not
We mentioned the scorecard as part of the weekly revenue team meeting, but we all know that what gets measured gets done, so having key performance indicators (KPIs) in a scorecard is critical to making any revenue generation system work.
Marketing, sales and customer service have a lot of important pieces. Setting up a weekly, monthly and quarterly scorecard is going to help you identify the most important numbers.
For your business, it might be website visitors, leads or sales opportunities generated, close rate, sales cycle days, pipeline value or pipeline velocity – it could be all of the above.
The key is selecting five to seven KPIs and tracking them weekly, monthly and quarterly. If your numbers are off track, move this to an issue and work with the team to figure out why and what you can do to get back on track.
Once you see green numbers across your scorecard, you’ll likely also see a company that hits its revenue goals month after month.
7.5. A Coach To Advise and Guide You
This one is less about a system and more about a bonus item.
In this case, it’s a coach – someone who specializes in working with companies to teach the process and help the team so that everyone understands how to use the tools, frameworks and materials to improve their efforts around revenue generation.
Like most coaches, they’re not there to do the work for you. Their role is to advise, guide and assist you in your efforts to learn the system and realize improvement in your marketing and sales execution.
A coach is part of our system because you’ll need someone to teach you the system, show you how to use the tools, guide you on the best practices and help you and your team make the changes necessary to get full value from the RGS program.
Learning something new isn’t easy. Having a coach gives you a resource who is experienced with the system and access to someone who can quickly and effectively help your team make the transition easier.
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The Secret to Generating High-Quality Leads for Your Sales Team
The Secret to Generating High-Quality Leads for Your Sales Team