Where does revenue come from?
It comes from acquiring new customers, retaining existing customers and expanding your engagement with existing customers.
In order for a company to scale sustainably, it needs to be successful in all three of those areas.
However, the functions of acquisition, retention and expansion are typically distributed among different teams within your company. Historically, the teams responsible for the various functions have existed in silos, which can create friction for customers.
Acquisition, retention and expansion all lead into each other, so the departments responsible for those functions need to be aligned, along with their tech stack and operations.
A revenue performance management firm helps accomplish that by working with the responsible teams to establish a shared set of data, a shared process and a shared language that enables them to all work toward the common goal of generating revenue for the company.
What is a Revenue Performance Management Firm?
A revenue performance management firm manages the functions that drive revenue for a company. They ensure that the functions of acquisition, retention and expansion are aligned in order to maximize profitability.
There’s a common misconception that outsourcing these functions stops at marketing, and that sales, customer service and customer success all need to stay in-house. But, marketing can only have so much of an impact if it’s not tied back to the rest of a company’s success.
Revenue performance management firms aim to be more than a single function agency. They want to be a true partner for their clients and do work that drives growth.
If a firm only cares about marketing and doesn’t think about what happens to the leads they bring in once they’re handed off, then there’s a limit to how much value they’re actually providing for their clients.
When it comes to these functions, companies need to be thinking “what happens next.” What happens after a visitor arrives on your site? What happens once a lead is sales qualified? What happens after a deal closes? What happens when a customer is up for renewal?
Not taking the entirety of the company into account can prevent any of these functions from impacting the bottom line.
Why Partner with a Revenue Performance Management Firm?
Revenue performance management is not easy. It involves teams across a company from marketing to sales to customer success to product and service delivery — plus those teams’ platforms and processes.
Getting outside expertise can provide holistic insights that ensure you’re doing everything correctly. All of those individual teams will have a unique way of operating, and it can be difficult for someone who’s a member of one team to effectively communicate with the other teams. An outside firm isn’t enmeshed in a single function’s processes thus can speak to all areas of expertise and bridge gaps between different areas of the organization.
Individual teams will be focused on the goals they’re measured on, and those goals don’t always tie back to company-wide growth. For example, if a support team is measured on ticket time-to-close rate and given ticket quotas they need to meet, they might not be considering how the tickets they’re resolving work toward each customer’s experience of your company. That can hurt retention and expansion even if the support team is meeting their goals.
The goal of a revenue performance management firm is sustainable growth, which allows them to step back and act as an unbiased advisor and prevent the seemingly positive performance of one team to harm the function they’re working toward.
So, by partnering with a revenue performance management firm, you’re able to outsource work that’ll actually contribute to sustainable growth.
