Growing revenue velocity - your firm's speed of growth - is the aspiration for most Founder/CEOs and Chief Revenue Officers that we meet. In this article we discuss the 7 key metrics available to these executives to optimise their revenue velocity and some best practices for building an effective revenue engine.
Buying B2B solutions is a long hard slog. Gartner says the median B2B buying group consists of between 6 and 10 people. Each of these people need four to five pieces of information to help them. Usually, around 83% of the time they have gone and sourced this information themselves.
Then starts the painful process of achieving consensus and a concrete action plan.
Brent Adamson, a Gartner distinguished VP, puts it this way.
"The hardest part about B2B solutions isn't selling them but buying them. Today's buying journey has effectively reached a tipping point where it's become unnavigable without a significant amount of help"
The B2B sales person plays a significant role in providing that help. Here's how.
The 'phone is undoubtably a critical business tool; it isn't going anywhere. So it makes little sense to have your 'phone system sitting out on a limb and not integrated with your other business systems. The shift to the cloud provides small and medium businesses with an affordable, simple way to fully integrate their suite of customer facing applications.
There are a Tsunami of applications floating in the cloud available and waiting to be connected to your customer tech stack. (wait...can you have a Tsunami in a cloud? Perhaps it's a thunderstorm?)
However, we usually firmly advise our clients against creating a Frankenstein's monster of applications from many different firms, connected via less-than-perfect APIs or via expensive custom code. Many providers have acquired technology to build into their own product stack rather than build it from scratch, which is simply putting lipstick on the proverbial pig.
So we have seen the powerful benefits of one unified codebase across your customer stack It's clearly the preferred solution. It creates a great deal less friction in your business. You spend less time doing your work. You learn a single user interface. Less things go wrong or stop working. The connections between software providers don't fail. The end result is significantly better and faster ROI.
I love my job…there you have it, I’ve said I out loud, I love my job! I get to play with HubSpot all day, onboarding people to the platform. I’m like a “pig in mud!” I get to see it work its magic in all different types of organisations, big, small, not-for-profits, service-based or product companies. You name it, we’ve done it.
But making the "HubSpot magic" happen actually takes a lot of practice and along the way I’ve learnt a lot about what does and (frankly speaking) what doesn’t work. Here is our 10 step approach.
It has finally happened, my business case got the thumbs up, my stakeholders have all said yes, the decision to invest in some software to significantly improve the effectiveness of our marketing and sales teams has been made!
It is genuinely exciting......and actually, now I come to think of it, really quite scary. What do I do now, where do I start, how long have I got before the CFO wants to see a return on their investment?
Sounds familiar? Getting new software to deliver its promised gains is more than technical implementation and onboarding, its about taking the humans who will use it on a journey and getting them to change their behaviour and that equals a lot of hard work, done over many months.
Mastering new automation software is central to marketers and salespeople alike. It’s an essential part of your modern tool kit. But learning – and more importantly remembering – how to use these essential tools can be daunting.
It turns out we’ve been forgetting things for a long time! And there is some interesting science that explains why.
