Revenue Acceleration

What is Revenue Acceleration?

Revenue acceleration is the process of aligning sales, marketing, and customer success initiatives to achieve faster revenue growth. To accelerate revenue, businesses have to personalize customer engagement, automate workflows, and foster continuous collaboration between departments through data sharing and common goal setting.

The pivotal idea behind revenue acceleration is that sales, marketing, and customer success departments shouldn’t operate in isolation — rather, they are an interconnected system with the overarching mission of maximizing revenue. This collaborative approach ensures all departments have a stake in the common revenue goals, thereby enhancing accountability and fostering the drive towards achieving these goals.

Synonyms

• Revenue growth improvement
• RevOps alignment

How Does Revenue Acceleration Work?

In the simplest terms, revenue acceleration works by increasing the speed at which customer-facing departments respond to customer needs, market conditions, and organizational objectives. It also requires each function to perform independently of each other, while still ensuring collaboration and coordination.

Doing this effectively requires an integrated system that allows for real-time data sharing, automation of key processes, and the ability to customize engagement strategies.

Marketing Revenue Acceleration

Marketing teams use data from sales and current customers to understand what exactly makes buyers tick. It’s equal parts art and science — marketers have to understand the customer journey from a qualitative and quantitative perspective then channel that knowledge into action.

Let’s break it down:

• Honing lead generation with data. Every good marketer knows the secret to effective lead generation is data. By analyzing sales and customer success data, marketers can identify patterns and trends that give them insight into why customers choose their products. With this information, they can refine their lead generation strategies. Then, they bring in marketing qualified leads (MQLs) more likely to convert.
• Hitting the right notes with omnichannel marketing. Some songs just sound better in certain settings. The same goes for marketing communications. By learning which channels resonate best with customers, the marketing team can optimize its omnichannel strategy. Whether it’s social media, email, or the company blog, knowing where different audience members listen (and the content they respond well to) is key to being heard by all of them.
• Refining messaging with customer segmentation. Businesses always sell to more than one type of customer. By identifying and segmenting customers, marketers can tailor their messaging so that each marketing asset delivers the right message to the right customer.
• Personalizing at scale with automation and enablement. Personalizing the customer experience is a major driver of revenue acceleration. Automation platforms can make it easier for marketers to nurture leads and engage current customers by serving them targeted content based on data in CRM/marketing systems.

Sales Revenue Acceleration

To accelerate revenue, sales teams need to understand their leads, decode their interests, and discern the value they receive. This understanding can help craft compelling pitches, foster more informed sales conversations, and move more deals to Closed Won.

Here’s how the sales team can kick it up a notch to drive revenue acceleration:

• Refining the ICP with success data. It all starts with the ideal customer profile (ICP). Using customer success data, sales teams can refine their ICP, then reach out to leads with real conversion chances.
• Scoring leads with a data-driven approach. Lead scoring is a game-changer. By taking into account both marketing engagement data — like the interactions leads have with the company’s blog or social media — and customer data, such as customer lifetime value (CLV) by segment, sales teams can identify and prioritize the most profitable customers first.
• Delivering the right content at the right time. Buyers spend most of their product hunt by themselves. If it’s all left up to the sales team, they won’t ever find the information they need. Marketers need to proactively develop buyer enablement content leads can use to inform their decisions. Eventually, this comes back around — they’re more equipped once they do sit for a demo.
• Addressing bottlenecks in the sales cycle. The average B2B sales cycle is over 100 days. By eliminating bottlenecks like long approval wait times, sales teams can speed up the sales process, moving deals through the pipeline more swiftly.
• Utilizing tools for personalized demos. Sellers can turn sales enablement into a superpower when it’s combined with lead-specific insights. Through continuous communication and data sharing with marketing, sales teams can deliver sales demos that hit the nail on the head.

Customer Success Revenue Acceleration

Customer success teams rely on insights from marketing and sales to understand customers’ needs, the challenges they face, and their quest for value. With that knowledge, they can create an environment in which customers stay and thrive.

Here’s how customer success teams can drive revenue acceleration:

• Eliminating churn with proactive customer onboarding. Churn kills revenue growth. Customer success teams should focus on proactively onboarding customers, helping them understand the product and fostering a long-term relationship with the company. This will save precious resources in the long run.
• Advising on best practices with guidance and enablement. Just like marketing, customer success should provide personalized advice to customers, so they get the most out of the product (and stay). This requires leveraging customer data to offer tailored solutions and tools supporting self-service, such as user guides and training videos.
• Streamlining communication with AI chatbots. Imagine a personal assistant who’s available around the clock, ready to address any queries or issues your customers might have. AI chatbots play this role, streamlining communication and personalizing experiences for a frictionless process. They improve customer satisfaction and give teams more time to focus on pressing customer issues.
• Using sales data for upsells and cross-sells. When customer accounts are tied directly to the products they currently use (and how exactly they use them), CS teams can proactively spot opportunities to provide additional value. By refining their messaging and timing their offers right, they can boost upsell and cross-sell conversions.
• Turning customers into supporters with advocacy programs. Advocacy is key to driving repeat sales and customer loyalty. Help customers become promoters of the product and build a solid customer base that will help generate more business opportunities.

Advantages of Implementing a Revenue Acceleration Strategy

Revenue Growth

Perhaps the clearest benefit of a revenue acceleration strategy is it promotes top-line revenue growth. The right tactics can help drive more leads, increase lead-MQL-SQL conversion rates, and shorten sales cycles — all of which mean better revenue outcomes.

Faster Sales Cycle

Time kills all deals. By implementing a revenue acceleration strategy, businesses can reduce the time it takes from lead to customer, cutting down the time it takes to move deals to the next stage. As an added benefit, it also increases conversions.

Increased Customer Retention

Happy customers keep coming back for more. Revenue acceleration helps companies build customer relationships by understanding their needs. In turn, this creates better experiences that drive loyalty.

Net Revenue Retention and Growth

Companies can grow their revenue from within through upsells, cross-sells, and upgrades. A revenue acceleration strategy can help target customers with personalized offers, which leads to higher revenue generation without even closing another deal.

Improved Customer Satisfaction

One of the most important objectives of a revenue acceleration strategy is to provide customers with the utmost quality in terms of services and support. When companies focus on customer satisfaction, they can retain their customers and create more opportunities for expansion.

How to Improve Revenue Acceleration

Build Out a RevOps Function

When it comes to revenue acceleration, businesses primarily focus on the customer-oriented initiatives that drive top-line revenue, alignment actually goes much deeper than that. Companies that deploy RevOps — a companywide function that integrates sales, marketing, and customer success team members — grow their revenue three times faster than those that don’t.

Briefly, adding a RevOps function involves the following steps:

1. Identify key leaders and organizational members from sales, marketing, and CS.
2. Assign roles and responsibilities to the RevOps team.
3. Set clear goals and objectives for sales, marketing, and customer success teams.
4. Define processes that will drive collaboration between these departments.
5. Track performance with key metrics from each department.

Align Revenue Strategy

After connecting sales and marketing with customer success, aligning their revenue objectives is the next step. This is where collaboration between teams comes into play. Marketers need to understand the sales team’s goals, objectives, and KPIs just as well as the sales team needs to understand those of marketing.

The goal is to create a cohesive plan that utilizes the unique functions of each department to their fullest extent. This could involve setting goals for customer lifetime value, upsells and cross-sells, or customer retention.

Implement Deal Scoring

Deal scoring is similar to lead scoring. It focuses on sales opportunities and helps identify which deals are most likely to close. It accomplishes this by assigning values to specific criteria, such as average deal size and customer lifetime value for the type of customer involved in the engagement.

Deals with the highest scores are prioritized first and targeted for follow-up. That way, sales reps focus their efforts on high-value deals and know when to shift their focus to others.

Larger companies use Dynamic Deal Scoring — an AI-driven deal scoring platform that supports complex sales processes and multivariate customer profiles.

Eliminate Friction Across Deal Stages

For revenue to actually “accelerate,” the whole deal cycle also has to. To achieve this, companies should:

• automate customer onboarding
• implement data-sharing protocols across sales, marketing, and success teams
• segment customer accounts in CRM and marketing automation
• use chatbots to handle simple customer queries and navigation issues
• allow customers to self-serve with instructional material and purchase flows
• streamline approval workflows for complex deals

Executive Operational Efficiency

Revenue teams do the legwork, but executives need to lead by example. Getting the exec board involved in revenue acceleration means driving operational efficiency at the highest levels.

For executives to truly be in touch with what’s happening on the sales floor or in marketing campaigns, they should:

• participate in (or lead) revenue review meetings
• proactively communicate with RevOps team members (including individual contributors)
• use multivariate data presented by sales, marketing, and customer success to make data-driven decisions at the highest level

One Source of Truth for Data

Revenue acceleration relies heavily on data. It’s what helps teams determine which tactics are working and which need to be improved. To get the most out of the data, companies should have tools in place that make it easy to collect, measure, analyze, and share data across departments.

Integrating CRM with marketing automation, CPQ software, subscription management, and helpdesk solutions can generate one source of truth for data and provide a comprehensive overview of customer interactions.

Integrate RevOps Software

Revenue operations software includes all the tools sales, marketing, and customer success teams need to accelerate revenue. It helps close deals faster by:

• streamlining processes across departments
• automating repetitive and error-prone tasks
• managing data and communication in one place

This is especially important for companies selling complex products and services, where deals usually involve a higher level of collaboration between different departments and levels of leadership.

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