How Does Your Revenue Grow?
When companies grow from year to year, they don’t grow in a straight line. They hold onto some revenue from current customers, they lose some revenue and customers, and they grow in other areas. Analyzing the ebb and flow of revenue and profit can help a company understand how it grows, plan for future growth, align sales roles, and motivate the right results in those roles.
The dimensions of buyers (both current customers and prospects) and offers (current and new products or services) describe a range of possible revenue flow opportunities. Among the possibilities are really just three basic strategies.
- An organization can retain the revenue from its current customers, which is called retention selling. While it may not actually lose any customer companies from one year to the next, an organization will usually lose some of its current revenue from current offers. It’s deceptive. The customer remains, but some of the business is lost. In fact, the average business-to-business sales organization retains only about 84 percent of its prior year revenue. So, to grow it has to find new revenue.
- A company can grow revenue from its current customers, which is called penetration selling. Penetration selling breaks into two different types of selling. Buyer penetration is gaining additional buyers for the same product or service. For example, a shipping company that focuses on ground transportation would try to get more buyers within the same large customer account to use their services instead of another carrier or shipping method. Product penetration is growing with additional products the customer may not be purchasing. So that same shipping company might capture more current customer growth by selling its air shipping service to a customer that’s already using the ground service.
- A company can create revenue through new customer selling, which also breaks into two types. New competitive wins provide growth through new customers who are already purchasing similar products from competitors. The shipping company may win a new contract of international shipping from a competitor who held that business last year. New market selling is developing a new opportunity with a new customer that hasn’t purchased that product before. For example, the shipping company may offer logistics services to a new customer to help them improve the operations of their warehouse facilities. Of course this strategy could ultimately result in the company winning the customer’s shipping business, too.
This is a good tool to plan coverage and sales roles and determine what breeds of seller the organization needs.
Next week I’ll write about the six dimensions of sales roles. Contact me at mark.donnolo@salesglobe.com with any questions or visit www.SalesGlobe.com.
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