Measure Your Revenue Generation Efforts In A Single Score

We use scores to measure a lot of important aspects of our lives. A credit score measures how well we pay our bills and how much debt we’ve incurred. A BMI (body mass index) score can show us how healthy our bodies are. NPS (net promoter score) shows us how likely our customers would be to refer us to their friends and colleagues.

All three of these scores are helpful in identifying if we need to improve.

Did you ever wonder what your company’s score would be when it comes to revenue generation and overall business growth?

Now it’s possible to not only get a revenue score for your company but to compare that score to other similar-sized companies and even grab a handful of helpful recommendations on how to improve your score.

In fact, a few of the companies that have already received their scores and are working on improvements have referred to this score as a Healthy Business Score. The higher the score, the healthier their companies.

You can get a Healthy Business Score for your company too, but before you do, why not take a peek at some of the areas you’ll be grading yourself on when you take a short, six-minute survey to help us score your company?

Here we go.

Setting Accurate And Achievable Goals

I’ve been involved in a lot of companies and setting achievable goals can be challenging. You want to stretch your team, but if you stretch them too much they give up. More importantly, your goals have to be based in reality and based in today’s data.

Just saying you want to finish the year at $5 million when you did $2 million last year won’t be enough. You need to have enough opportunities, enough people to follow up on the opportunities and enough tools to manage the opportunities in an automated way. You also must have the story, content and marketing assets to turn any market opportunity into demand and then into leads.

This is all easier said than done.

If you don’t support your goals with the investment and resources necessary to hit those goals, you’ll end up with a similar outcome as when you set overly aggressive goals. Your team will give up before they even start because they know it’s just not doable. Worse, they might not share that sentiment with you.

Having A Single Person Accountable And Responsible For Revenue

This single person is only present at 25% of the companies we’ve talked to. It might seem like it would be higher, but we are NOT talking about a sales leader. We’re talking about someone responsible and accountable for all aspects of revenue.

Revenue from new customers, revenue from current customers and generating enough leads from marketing to hit your revenue numbers – one person should oversee all these disparate activities.

EOS has its Integrator role. We have our Rainmaker role. If you don’t have a Rainmaker, it’s going to be very hard to hit your revenue goals month over month.

Your Rainmaker should be laser-focused on just one thing for your business — revenue. They are looking into every nook and cranny for it. They are making sure you have enough sales opportunities. They are working to ensure those close quickly and at a higher rate.

They are looking across your customer base for hidden sources of revenue and thinking of how to create new sources of revenue for your company. Every single hour of every single day, they are planning or working on ways to ensure you hit your revenue goal month in and month out.

To learn more about the Rainmaker role inside RGS™, read this article.

Allocating Enough Resources To Hit Your Goals

Do you have enough people, time, money and energy to even hit your stated revenue goals? In so many companies, the goals are so misaligned with the human capital and financial resources allocated that goal attainment is impossible.

Are you running enough campaigns? Do you have enough marketing tactics in play? Do you have enough salespeople? What about customer service folks?

All these resources need to be aligned with your goals, and unfortunately, time and time again we see that companies are grossly misaligned.

You have your stated revenue goals, but you don’t have enough people to execute the demand generation and inbound marketing programs needed to produce enough leads to get you to those goals.

You have your stated goals, but your sales process doesn’t close at a high enough rate to reach those goals.

You have your stated goals, but you need 25% more revenue from customer service team members cross-selling and upselling current customers, and no one is building, installing or monitoring those efforts.

Yes, all these programs are going to take time, energy, people and investment. Now you either have to up your game and fund your stated goals or revisit and lower your goals to get them in line with the available resources.

It’s a tough decision to have to make, but it’s the right call.

Recognizing Your Company Needs A Big Story And Solid Differentiation Messaging

If you’re being honest with yourself and objectively assessing your company, you should take a hard look at your company’s Big Story and how it differentiates.

This is a simple exercise. Google your three largest or toughest competitors and look at their websites. Do the headlines sound like yours? Is it even close? How are they differentiating their business? Is it even remotely like yours?

For example, if you say you have the best people, do you think your competitors are telling your prospects that their people are average? Of course not.

If you say you have the most experience, even if you do, do you think your competitors are telling your prospects that their experience is lacking? Of course not.

You can’t go to market with anything even close to what your competitors are saying. You need a story that is emotional, compelling and engaging enough to get the attention of every prospect in your market.

You need to differentiate your company with at least three solid reasons why you’re the ONLY company on the planet to do business the way you do it. Seth Godin calls this remarkable. What makes you remarkable? He is 100% correct. Remarkable elevates the bar, and it has to be something NO other competitor can claim.

It’s challenging, but it’s required. If you’re not remarkable, you’re invisible.

Using A Defined And Documented Sales Process

If you don’t have a visually documented sales process that everyone follows for every sales opportunity, you don’t have a sales process.

You can’t continuously improve a sales process if it’s not documented.

You can’t measure the performance of your sales process if it’s not documented and set up in your CRM. You can’t expect everyone to follow the company sales process if your CRM doesn’t support each and every stage, step, email and follow-up task.

If some people are able to do their own thing simply because they’re successful, you’re preventing your business from scaling and growing. It might not seem that way, but it’s a proven fact.

On top of that, your sales process can be a differentiating factor. At Square 2, we regularly win business because our sales process is inclusive and educational. It engages our prospects in strategic conversations so that we can design solutions to deliver on their strategic objectives.

You need to have a similar process at your company.

Executing A Regular Pulse And Rhythm For Meetings, To-Dos And Issues

People have a need for regular rhythms in their life, including at their jobs. It’s incredibly important as you work toward hitting your revenue goals consistently that you have a regular weekly pulse around everything revenue.

This should look like a revenue team meeting where you follow the same agenda and format for 90 minutes each week.

Review your key metrics and your scorecard. If you’re on track for your quantitative goals, no additional conversation is needed. If you’re off track, dig into why and what can be done about it.

Celebrate your successes and discuss how to replicate them. Identify failures for the week, digging into what caused them and what can be done to prevent them from happening again. 

Review your big sales opportunities on both the customer and the prospect side to make sure that everyone is aligned around helping to close those big opportunities. Talk about what else could be done to bring them to closure faster or improve your odds of winning those deals.

Make sure that a big chunk of the meeting is dedicated to working through issues. Get clarity around the real issue, discuss options and find ways to solve those issues.

A result should be to-dos assigned to individuals with clear definitions and dates on when they should be completed.

The result of this regular weekly revenue team meeting is immediate and focused action on the issues that will help you get to your revenue goals more consistently and help your company grow.

These are just a few of the areas you’ll evaluate yourself and your team against when you take the six-minute survey. When you get your score, you’ll see how you compare with other companies, and you’ll get three ideas you can use today to help improve your score.

Most importantly, you’ll have a quantitative measure of how well (or how poorly) you’re doing when it comes to generating revenue and growing your business. 

Now you can take massive and immediate action to improve the score.

You might even consider sharing the survey with a few team members at your company so you can get a 360-degree perspective. Getting scores from different team members will give you much more insight into how others view your revenue generation efforts. Good or bad, these extra data points are helpful.

Better yet, sit down with one of our team members and review your score question by question. Let us go a bit deeper to help you understand why these areas are so important, learn what you can do to improve and get some specific steps you can take now that will improve your score and your overall business performance in weeks, not months or even years.