Remarkably, most western Canadian companies lack a reliable process to generate revenue. Leaders can address this by instituting a selling system supported by good tracking and management.
Revenue Stability
In February of 2023, we hosted a sold-out CEO Event featuring Chad Banman of Sandler Sales in Edmonton. For over a decade, Chad has been training, educating, and designing systems to help companies bulletproof their revenue generation.
Chad opened with a discussion about how important revenue is to any business. Revenue is like oxygen. Without revenue, nothing else exists in a business - assets, money, employees, products, services, and so on. Without revenue a company dies.
A remarkable number of organizations in Alberta don’t have an established process for revenue generation. They don’t know their buyer’s journey, don’t know what activities drive which outcomes, and don’t measure and coach to performance. “Alberta is a decade behind many other places in North America.”
This is a big problem. Without a revenue generation process, firms are at the whim of the marketplace and competitors. They are lost when it comes to investing, recruiting, measuring, and coaching their people. It’s like flying through fog without instruments.
Four Steps to Bulletproofing Your Revenue
Chad recommends the following steps to bulletproof revenue generation in your company:
- Start by understanding and documenting your buyer’s journey. Map the steps or stages that a buyer goes through from not knowing your brand to making a purchase and becoming a raving fan that refers others to you.
Once the buyer stages are understood, then establish the supporting steps that you want your sales and marketing team to take. Each step will require different actions to engage the buyer, remove friction, and make it easy for the buyer to take action and move along in the journey.
Chad refers to this as the buyer/seller dance. Sellers must learn how to be in step with buyers.
There could be several different buyer journeys in your company for different product lines or offerings, and each should be documented individually. - Next, define the selling roles needed within your organization and the skills required for each. Multiple roles may be needed at different stages of the buyer journey.
For each role, define the skills required. The skills needed will vary by product line (the different journeys) and stage. For example, the skills required to open brand new prospect relationships are very different than those needed to maintain a client and encourage repeat purchases.
Chad says the one skill that spans all roles and is critically important is curiosity. People in any revenue generating role must display deep and authentic curiosity. - Once the buyer journey is known, then measure performance. Clarify a set of metrics that together indicate the health of your revenue pipeline. Typical measurements could include outcomes like sales revenue, new client contracts, and product line profitability. But more importantly, management needs to know their leading indicators. Leading indicators are a measure of the activities that drive the outcomes and can include things like website visits and contact forms, new prospect introduction meetings, conversation rates from stage-to-stage, and so on.
- Finally, organizations that truly want to bulletproof their flow of revenue need to coach their people. Equipped with unmistakeable clarity of what outcomes are needed, what activities drive those outcomes, and what skills and behaviors are needed for the activities, managers can spot gaps and coach to higher performance.
One of the biggest misses for leaders is just not making time for coaching. Too many do not make it a priority. “It needs to get into your schedule,” argues Chad. It’s not optional.
Secondly, managers must help individual employees discover what changes they need to make by asking good questions. People won’t change just because they are told to. They must see the gap and commit personally to the change.
Unleashing the Potential of Your Organization
Bulletproofing your revenue generation is not a quick fix. It requires commitment, time, and effort. But properly applying these techniques will remove the uncertainty and pay huge returns.
If you’d like to learn more about how to bulletproof your revenue, or other ways you can take the simpler path to creating a great business, connect with us or consider attending one of our upcoming leadership events.
