How 15 Financial Service clients assess their revenue growth capabilities and their areas of highest priority. Republishing a brief that I wrote several years ago with key items that apply to 2023.
The diagnostic data summarized in the attached report is from 15 financial service companies who were in various stages of working with my team at SBI.
Each company assessed their company’s revenue growth capabilities with a Revenue Growth Diagnostic. These insights are still pertinent in many companies that I've been dealing with since the original diagnostic assessments were performed in 2018.
Aligned to SBI's Revenue Growth Methodology, the following revenue strategy areas scored the highest value to the business with the lowest capability or internal performance evaluation of how they’re performing today.
Our recommendations to address these Top Five revenue growth areas include:
1. Improve Customer Experience: Make the customer experience a competitive differentiator. Customer’s expectations have risen and failure to provide an exceptional experience for each customer results in poor revenue growth. Some customers prioritize their experience over product performance when making a purchase decision. This requires a deep understanding of the customer’s journey, and each touch point along the way. Mapping this customer journey is a difficult, yet mission-critical task that, when done correctly, results in exceptional revenue growth.
2. Improve Intelligence & Actions Around Accounts: Prioritize accounts that appreciate your value proposition and are willing to pay for it. Customer willingness-to-pay is highly variable. Unless you can set prices by customer segment, you will always be leaving revenue and profits on the table. To do this successfully, you must have a deep understanding of the willingness to-pay, the attributes of an account that dictates willingness-to-pay, and the account needs you must satisfy to command pricing at that level.
3. Quotas Are Essential & Require Alignment to Corporate Objectives: A company’s revenue goal needs to be intelligently allocated to divisions, regions, districts, territories, and sales reps. Quota attainment, a metric tracked by most sales teams, often lies to executives. Reps who make quota do so because their quota expectation was based on the potential of a sales territory. Reps who miss quota do so because their quota expectation was not based on the potential of the assigned sales territory.
4. Invest and Deploy Effective Marketing Operations: Make marketing scientific. Increase return on marketing investments. Data is everywhere. Channels are exploding. Technology is changing. Executives require more detailed reporting. Intuition and experience are no longer enough. You are living in the “show me” era. Marketing leaders cannot deal with this alone. You need a right hand, called marketing ops.
5. Packaging Generates Pricing Advantage: Many companies don’t have a pricing organization. Some don’t need one. But often, those who do need a robust pricing organization arbitrarily assign pricing control to product, marketing, strategy, Finance or sales. Or they split pricing control across several functions. Where pricing is placed and the resources it has will significantly impact its focus and activities. To build and execute upon pricing strategies effectively, you need to carefully consider where pricing naturally fits into the organization, what it should do, how it should operate, and what skills, capabilities, and processes it needs to be successful.
Summary Actions to Take:
1. Conduct the Revenue Growth Methodology assessment to understand where you can improve and what will generate the most value to your unique situation.
2. Agile methods and approaches should be used in your improvement programs. Prototype, test, deploy, reiterate.
3. Leverage pertinent and proven (outside) partners who have core expertise in the areas you are addressing.
Download more of my brief from 2018 and the details on the financial services companies analyzed.
Additional questions or interested in a discovery, please reach out to mslonaker@mattallendevelopment.com.
