Holistic Revenue Part 2: The Revenue Engine
When something becomes obsolete and unsuccessful, it’s naturally replaced by something else. That’s true in everything, but especially so in a world as fluid as sales. Because buyers are constantly evolving, the sales process must adapt at an equal pace to stay up to speed.
In Part 1 of this blog series, we discussed the death of the sales unicorn and why hiring a do-it-all salesperson to get you passed a revenue plateau is a waste of time, effort, and money.
We know the sales unicorn is a thing of the past, so what fills the void? As a CEO, how can you find and implement a new solution that actually helps you get over this stagnant period and continue scaling your revenue? What is the inclusive solution that accomplishes everything the sales unicorn was meant to accomplish?
It’s something we like to call the revenue engine. This comprehensive, cross-department solution is the most effective way to set your revenue up to scale — we know because we’ve seen it happen first hand at House of Revenue®.
In the second part of this series, we’ll explain how marketing, sales, customer success, and revenue operations (RevOps) all function together to build lasting revenue engines, and how you can get started on building yours.
Break Down the Silos
Before getting into the specifics of revenue engines and how to build one, we need to make one thing clear: you will not be able to scale revenue if marketing, sales, and customer success are still operating in silos.
Siloed departments limit the potential of your organization as a whole. As a CEO, if you notice your revenue-generating departments working independently from one another, that’s a problem. In something as collaborative as modern sales, departments cannot decide their priorities and goals without consulting with other units — it just won’t produce long-term results.
Departments that operate in tandem, on the other hand, will be able to set realistic, attainable goals together and understand the specific role they play in achieving those goals. This fosters communication, allows departments to hold each other accountable, and is the basis for what every CEO facing a revenue plateau should be striving to create — the revenue engine.
What Is the Revenue Engine
House of Revenue defines the revenue engine as a machine constructed of equal parts marketing, sales, customer success, and RevOps that is designed to scale your revenue in the long run, not just grow it for a short period of time.
All departments of the revenue engine work in tandem with each other to lift and enable the other departments. Let’s break down each department in specific.
RevOps
We start with RevOps for a specific reason — it’s the glue that holds all the other departments together. RevOps breaks down the aforementioned silos between departments and improves internal alignment through technology and automation.
When your organization has the appropriate technology and automation in place (thank you HubSpot), creating a lasting revenue engine becomes infinitely more feasible. From tracking appropriate marketing KPIs and automating email communication to organizing prospect information and utilizing a CRM, RevOps and automation set the stage for the entire revenue engine.
Marketing
As we discussed in the first part of this series, you cannot improve your sales performance by solely focusing on sales training or coaching. You could have the top sales rep in the country, but if they don’t have any qualified people to sell to, what’s the point?
Nowadays, modern buyers have already completed up to 80% of the traditional Awareness-Consideration-Decision process before engaging with the sales team.
Your marketing team must use this to its advantage and create holistic campaigns that attract and engage the buyer throughout their journey, making it clear why you offer the best solutions for their problems.
Sales
The next cog in the revenue engine is sales. Even if your marketing team perfectly executes a campaign that attracts your exact buyer, it won’t mean anything if your sales department is not equipped to win the deal.
Sales training and implementation of strategic processes are effective in improving sales performance, but investment into RevOps and marketing play an equal role. By investing in industry-leading technology and allocating appropriate time and energy into creating a sound inbound marketing campaign, you actually set your sales team up to do what they do best — sell.
No longer will they have to spend countless hours doing the manual tasks of a sales unicorn. With an expansive list of qualified leads and the automation in place to reach those leads, well-trained salespeople will significantly improve their results.
Customer Success
This final component to the revenue engine we employ at House of Revenue, customer success is often neglected. The sales process doesn’t end after a salesperson wins the deal — now it’s up to you to ensure that the customer’s experience with your company far surpasses their wildest imagination.
Ensuring customer satisfaction does two critical things in relation to revenue scale:
- Creates upsell opportunities among existing clients
- Builds trustworthy referrals for future clients
If you neglect the customer after the sell, the entire foundation upon which your revenue engine is built could collapse.
Summary
There are no shortcuts to creating a successful revenue engine. It takes effort, commitment, and alignment between every part of the engine. If you try to skip even one step in the process, there are sure to be glaring holes that will prevent you from scaling revenue.
Here at House of Revenue, that’s what we do best. We take the time to (re)build your entire revenue engine and set you up for sustainable scale. Reach out to us today to get started!
Make sure to come back for the third and final piece of the series as we show you exactly what happens when your revenue engine is firing on all cylinders.