Are You Ready?
Expediting your revenue growth requires an investment in people, tools, and process. There are inherent risks. Building a plan for where you are today, where you want to go, and a projected ROI period is critical to understand. Building a sales and marketing team without a plan is a "Hope" strategy.
Building the RIGHT Sales Team
Every company wants to build and maintain "hockey stick" growth. For most organizations, especially in the IT Services economy, this is a big challenge. Exponential revenue growth requires an investment in time, people and process. The right sales team approach may yield results relatively quickly, but more importantly, could provide the necessary building blocks to continually innovate and capture future market share. The wrong approach just burns capital.
Companies at different development stages require different sales and marketing approaches.
Building a sales organization requires some level of risk. Many organizations simply need a strong starting point, others have a solid foundation but need to build more sophisticated methodologies and metrics. Understanding the short term revenue goals and the long term vision of the company can help guide the appropriate investments and reduce some of the risk.
Startups or Family businesses that are targeting an investment from private equity or venture capital, should start building the type of sales and marketing strategy that they want to scale post investment. Revenue systems take time to build, start the foundation early.
The overall goal is to build a company that is a Market Leader. Market Leader's brand and reputation is well established in the market place. The renowned Market Leader gets to compete on more deals and can focus on building innovative solutions that continue to keep them ahead of the competition.
Many organizations are not ready for what we refer to as the "EBITA Stage" (Earnings Before Interest Taxes Amortization). Typically, Market Leaders will need to transition to EBITA. This can be tricky. The strategy should be well planned out and the organization, as a whole, is prepared for the metamorphosis.
Requirements for Scale
The primary systems for scaling revenue are the Marketing Engine and the Sales Machine. Both systems should be fully intertwined by the CRM. Every interaction with a prospect should be recorded in the CRM by both the sales and marketing teams.
The Marking Engine is fueled by content. This content should build upon the value proposition and continually diversify and innovate that message. This content is multi-modal, reused, and updated often. Marketing tools that can support the multi-model dissemination should be invested in. The primary goal is to drive prospects and suspects to the website. The website should be enabled to track all visitor interaction.
The Sales Team should be constantly apprised of new content and have the ability to provide it directly to their target prospects and current customers. They should not be relied on to produce their own content for public consumption.
The Sales Team needs to have focus. Strategic Account target lists should be built and directly aligned to the Ideal Customer Profile. Prospecting requires an in-depth approach and sporadic account chasing should be avoided. Training on product, marketing, and sales engagement methodologies should be scheduled on a consistent basis.
