WWWR Ep 35: Your Approach To Revenue Generation Is Not Agile

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In this episode of What’s Wrong With Revenue? we talked about the best way to approach the ongoing and constant quest to generate leads and demand for your products and services.

I don’t think we can stress this enough – this activity never ends. You can never pause managing your financial performance. You can never take a break from sales. Your CEO never says to pause working on the company for the next three months. You can never pause, stop or take a break from marketing either.

So then what methodology should you deploy to keep everything associated with lead and demand generation going every day, week and month all through the year?

Most companies use waterfall, a large project plan with dependencies that flow all the work from beginning to end. Many companies still do annual marketing plans or, not surprisingly, don’t do any marketing planning at all.

All three of these approaches are antiquated and not aligned with how revenue growth is executed today.

Today, marketing, sales and customer service must be 100% Agile. Agile with a capital “A” has some very specific requirements associated with it.

The kind of Agile we practice at Square 2, and the kind of Agile we teach our clients, involves planning inside a 90-day strategic window. From there we create three 30-day sprints that are co-created with our clients.

The work is informed by the performance of the program and the data we have available. This allows us to make changes, adjustments and ongoing optimization to any campaigns or tactics being deployed in almost real time.

We run regular retrospectives to catch what didn’t go as planned and make quick fixes to prevent it from happening again.

We analyze the data, uncover insights, use those insights to inform our action plan and then execute that plan — every 30 days.

We reviewed a few of the roles that are required to run an Agile revenue generation effort. It includes an Agile-trained project manager, consultants who are capable of analyzing the data but more importantly pulling out the insights and a delivery team of seasoned specialists who can quickly respond and optimize their execution based on data.

The show also spent time reviewing the performance lift associated with moving from waterfall to Agile. This includes team efficiency but, more importantly, it includes program improvements because the team can cycle and optimize much faster than traditional approaches.

It’s important to remember that we didn’t just wake up and move to Agile on a Monday morning. It took careful planning, pilots, training, new tools and new processes. Today, it continues to take practice to maintain our specific Agile delivery methodology.

Our audience got a full set of takeaways that might help them decide if Agile is right for their company and, if so, how to tackle it.

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