MESSAGE FROM OUR FOUNDER
#RevDrivers: The Heroes Without Capes
Revenue is the lifeblood of any enterprise. In the end, revenue is the ultimate benchmark of success. Products, brand recognition, innovation are all vital so far as they contribute to sales. Innovative companies with good products fail all the time simply because they fail to generate sufficient revenue. And make no mistake, investors can take you only so far. Beyond that, it is the revenue engine you’ve built that ultimately determines your growth trajectory.
Contrary to popular belief, generating revenue isn’t a one-person job. Your CEOs and CROs are only a part of the story. It is, in fact, a mix of people that for lack of an encompassing title, I call RevDrivers. The sales guys, the marketing directors and analysts, the account executives, the growth managers, basically anyone who is directly associated with sales, marketing or success/retention are all RevDrivers and form the backbone of any revenue engine.
Broadly speaking, RevDrivers consist of 4 core components:
1. PEOPLE
People are the key to any organizational success. Not individually but as a team. Bold, dynamic, and creative people working in concert can create consistent revenue streams that define the path for long-term growth. RevDrivers are responsible for three key roles:
- Marketing: These are the people who project your company and product to a wider audience. They yield the power to build and shape your company as a brand and generate the leads that feed your funnel.
- Sales: These are the people who quite literally bring the checks home. They are the foot soldiers who deal 1:1 with prospects to close deals and drive the revenue.
- Customer Success: The people in customer success act as a bridge between a company and its clients. Not only do they delight customers with their prompt and seamless support but their direct interface with customers also enables them to provide real-time and honest feedback to further refine the product as well as sales and marketing strategies.
These teams, when appropriately structureded, work in tandem to consistently fill and optimize the sales funnel. The marketing team, for instance, provides Marketing Qualified Leads (MQLs) that the sales team prospects and converts. The Customer Success team can then channel satisfied customers back to the sales funnel for upsell/cross-sell opportunities and to marketing to highlight success stories and spread word of mouth.
2. PROCESS
Another core element of RevDrivers is how these teams interact and leveraging the data they have. If marketing is optimizing for MQL’s that are not qualified or progress to Sales Qualified Leads (SQLs) and closed deals, then you’re spinning your wheels. There has to be a well-defined and robust process that engages each of these teams at appropriate levels and in coordination with one another. To take a simple example, the marketing team might determine the Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and Total Addressable Market (TAM) and using those criteria to select targeted accounts, begin a campaign that generates 2K leads. The sales team will then identify the high-value accounts and use intent and engagement data to prioritize the most appropriate prospects. Some will convert, others will choose demos or trials. Then customer support sits at the end of the funnel with customers who have already purchased or have shown strong interest through trials. It is then their task to offer impeccable and relentless service to delight customers and channel them back to the marketing and sales teams.
Inversely, if there is a poor conversion rate, the sales team can provide feedback that would result in a more refined marketing strategy to provide better-qualified leads. Be it strategizing or feedback, RevDrivers align all the efforts to achieve a common goal.
3. TECHNOLOGY
Processes and the technology platforms that they live on are virtually inseparable. Signals can only be acted upon only if there are appropriate systems in place at both the micro and macro level. Foundational systems like marketing automation, CRM and sales enablement platforms make teams more efficient while project management tools can help oversee execution.
4. DATA AND INTELLIGENCE
As per a Bureau of Labor Statistics report, 24% of new businesses fail in the first year, and 48% didn’t make it past the second year. And while there are numerous factors at play, one of the key reasons is that they fail to understand the market. In that sense, data and intelligence have now emerged as the key tools for RevDrivers. Data and intelligence are critical to accurately evaluating and determining your ICP and TAM, which are critical to the formation of a more effective strategy.
While I am not trying to downplay the importance of the product and product-market fit, they are not sufficient in and of themselves for success. What my two decades of entrepreneurial experience have taught me is that often a minimally viable product combined with a well-honed team of RevDrivers can often outperform a more polished product. Revenue can then be invested in further product development and refinement. Ultimately, revenue creates a virtuous feedback loop where RevDrivers use product offerings to close deals that in turn makes the product better, leading to even higher revenues.
We at SalesIntel play a tiny but crucial part of that process. We empower the foot soldiers, the bold marketers, with the best-in-the-industry data and intelligence, so they never have to worry about meeting those quarterly goals.
DATA UPDATE
Search 41 Million Technographic Data Points for 1.2+ Million Companies in SalesIntel Database!
From 7.1 million technographic data points for 75,000 companies earlier this year to 41 Million technographic data points for over 1.2 million companies available to our users! This update covers 5,744 vendors and 11,000 products. Thanks to our amazing partner HG Insights and our world-class research team, our technographic data maintains the same quality as our contact data, 95% accurate.
PRODUCT UPDATES
SalesIntel Chosen in DC Inno’s 2019 50 on Fire!
We’re excited to share that Jason Hubbard, VP of Growth at SalesIntel, was chosen as one of six people for DC Inno’s 2019 50 on Fire’s Design, Development and Marketing category!
50 on Fire is a celebration of Greater Washington innovators – big and small, people and organizations – across multiple categories.
UPCOMING EVENT
Webinar: 5 Reasons Your CRM Strategy is Failing and What to Do About It
Date : Nov 7, 2019 Time : 1:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT
You’ve spent thousands of dollars on technology to help your business run, track reporting and make your sales reps’ days easier. Yet, after all these years the MarTech stack strategy and cloud-tool adoption are still relevant (and possibly extremely annoying if broken) topics. So how can you tell what’s broken in your CRM strategy and what can you do about?
Join us and learn the best ways to:
- Where is the breakdown in your strategy?
- Sales reps, are they lazy or just not incentivized?
- How to get information into the CRM without data entry
- Garbage in, garbage out
UPCOMING EVENT
Webinar: 5 Keys to Success at Dreamforce
Date : Nov 5, 2019 Time : 1:00 pm – 1:30 pm EDT
Dreamforce is almost here and there’s a lot to get ready: swag, flights, hotels, booth set up and scheduling meetings. Yet, are you getting the tools your reps need to hit the ground running when they get back to the office? What if you could easily get 20,000 more leads from the Dreamforce expo floor?
Join us and learn the best ways to:
- What to do with all the business cards
- Append incomplete registration data
- Add decision-makers
- Gather company intelligence
- Track buying intent signals
EVENT RECAP
Webinar: ABM Automation Isn’t Scary, How to Make it Simple & Sweet
Don’t miss out on this amazing webinar!
If your ABM process requires a great deal of manual effort that leaves you wondering how you could begin to possibly scale it, then you won’t want to miss this webinar. You can still catch the recording of Jason Hubbard, VP of Growth at SalesIntel dives into ways to simplify your ABM automation.
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