In my continuing series of blog posts on gaining that proverbial “seat” at the senior management table, I have discussed the importance of being more agile and social in marketing, and throughout the entire revenue process. In this week’s post, I focus on the importance of being increasingly more “connected” in all of your marketing, sales, and revenue-oriented activities.
Of course, a sure fire way to strengthen connectivity – as well as enhance both agility and social media engagement – is adopting Revenue Performance Management (RPM). At its core, RPM is all about driving integration between the corporate functions that are so crucial to generating more revenue, but which too often operate as disconnected silos.
Just to make sure everyone is clear on what RPM really is, here is an updated definition:
Revenue Performance Management is a strategy and a set of processes and methodologies that enable companies to optimize their interactions with buyers across the entire Revenue Cycle to drive more predictable and sustainable revenue growth. In order to achieve this kind of transformation, companies must address organization, compensation and incentives, job roles, and work practices as well as their technology infrastructure.
Using RPM, corporations can literally transform the way they operate and enable marketing and sales alignment, by:
- Managing the marketing department as a true revenue-generating organization
- Adopting a perspective that revenue creation starts when a company first meets a prospective buyer and continues to deal close and through to ongoing customer loyalty
- Implementing a systematic and integrated process of nurturing prospective buyers through the Revenue Cycle, and measuring buyer engagement at every step of the process
- Providing sales teams with the information and tools they need to prioritize their time so that they can engage with the most qualified prospective buyers, at exactly the moment each buyer is ready to act
- Measuring the effectiveness and return-on-investment (ROI) of spending on people and programs at every step of the Revenue Cycle across marketing and sales
- Using these facts about effectiveness and ROI to allocate investments to accelerate results with unprecedented visibility and predictability into revenue performance
Today’s Hyper-Connected Marketing
The net of the above definition is that getting marketing and sales to work – and work together – is a cornerstone of RPM. And, managing every aspect of the Revenue Cycle as a connected, interdependent process is also vital to realizing the huge growth potential that is the true promise of RPM.
This level of process integration and connectivity is especially important for marketers and marketing departments. Marketers these days cannot operate as islands, floating out there all by themselves in the corporate sea. Everything the marketing department does must be hyper-connected throughout the enterprise and also with all of the critical outside ecosystems that feed into the company’s RPM engine.
An example of being more connected is making sure that your revenue processes are seamlessly connected to third-party data providers that enable one-click campaign management and implementation. Whether it’s for social programs, events, or even to comply with arcane (but incredibly important) export regulations, marketers are embracing technology platforms and solutions that closely tie into the actionable information and data sources they need to drive high performance revenue programs.
This is not a “nice to have” in the globally-networked business environment. Driving more and better connectivity in your company’s vital demand chain represents a valuable opportunity for the marketing team to “own” an essential part of the RPM process.
Agility, social engagement, and connectivity are all key attributes of high performance marketing departments in the 21st Century. Next week I will highlight the final and arguably most important attribute, “intelligence.”
Why is this attribute so important? Ultimately, successful sales and marketing efforts – and definitely RPM – run on intelligent insights that drive revenue building strategies and campaigns.
Phil Fernandez