Businesses are being lured into a false sense of security as signs of post-pandemic economic recovery steadily mount and a sense of normalcy increasingly returns. Anxious to recoup lost revenue, many organizations are waiting for sales to rebound to pre-pandemic levels, confident that it is just around the corner. But this thinking is misguided.
The pandemic has permanently changed the DNA of buying and selling, evidenced by an accelerated shift to digital and remote, and we’re never going back. Companies that don’t adapt quickly enough to meet their buyers’ digital-first preferences will end up with unfulfilled quotas, insufficient pipelines, and profits well below expectations – a revenue reckoning.
But there is a way forward. On the path to post-pandemic revenue, there are five milestones that every organization must attain for a successful journey.
Involve the CEO
The stakes involved for every B2B company are high and it is best to get the CEO involved when a crisis can be prevented rather than after one is underway. Their involvement will be crucial in reallocating resources and determining the necessary technology investment to address post-COVID revenue challenges.
For instance, if your company was not digitally native before 2020, it is likely that your current team doesn’t possess all the necessary skills to guide your company to where it needs to be. What’s more, some of those skills, like technology optimization or data management, are only needed in a fractional capacity and won’t require a full-time employee. The CEO alone is uniquely positioned to make the decisions on how best to proceed.
As companies continue emerging out of pandemic-crisis mode, the CEO must steer the course towards digital-first strategies by dividing the change into a succession of manageable increments, each of which delivers tangible value in the form of measurable revenue outcomes. This will help you avoid the risk of your digital transformation ballooning into an expensive and distracting academic project.
Regenerate Demand
The customer journey has shifted, and your funnel strategy must follow suit. Efforts should shift to prospecting activities to influence the front of the buyer’s journey. There are two places most B2B companies can go to find quick wins.
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The first is your corporate website. Website performance is the foundation for achieving success in all forms of demand generation. You need a website where interested visitors can quickly find problems that resemble their own, solutions that they can imagine working for them, and satisfied reference customers who look like them. Pricing guidance should be readily available, and the material they need to convince themselves and persuade others on the buying committee should be easily accessible. If your site is not converting visitors into leads and playing an active role in full-funnel selling, your most important player isn’t in the game.
The next area of focus should be to build a plan around driving new opportunities from your existing customers. Assuming you have done a good job nurturing past customers, this should be the fastest path to repeat purchases, expansion or cross-selling. Existing customers also can provide references to other customers. Back-to-base programs have proved life-sustaining for many businesses during the past year and will continue to maintain their importance in the digital-first future.
Scrutinize the Pipeline
The revenue crisis will first manifest in the decline of a qualified pipeline. Digital-first buying behavior is extending timelines for lead qualification and opportunity management, dramatically impacting revenue algebra. Diversifying and growing lead sources is a must.
As you increase your focus on pipeline creation, you need to make sure you have consistent standards on how a qualified opportunity is defined. There must be a crisp distinction between a lead – a company with one or more associated contacts – which has not yet committed to a buying process, and an opportunity – a company with an identified need and associated contacts – which has declared its intent to consider a purchase.
Businesses must scrutinize their standards for what is considered a qualified opportunity to avoid an overly rosy and potentially disastrous unrealistic outlook.
Unify Sales, Marketing and Tech
In a digital-first world, it is critical that the sales, marketing and IT departments function as one to create and execute plans that solve overall revenue objectives. Most companies are not organized to help a prospect navigate their way to a buying decision in a way that meets the buyer’s modern expectations and preferences. In fact, many of their functions often carry organizational design legacies that are not well suited for a buying journey that jumps back and forth between self-service and human engagement, but now that must change. With the unification of these teams, businesses can streamline the buyer experience to ensure a connected customer journey with one common data source.
To unify these teams, companies must involve key players across all departments in strategic discussions to help shape strategy and streamline operations. CEOs today are increasingly leading companies to form unified business and technology teams that each support a particular business objective.
If this unification wasn’t a priority for your organization prior to 2021, it needs to be. Now is the time to re-evaluate and drive a top-down strategy to ensure revenue-driving efforts aren’t siloed and that a potential prospect is in the right place in the buying cycle.
Strengthen Revenue Operations
Beyond unifying the teams that are connected to revenue generation, businesses must also strengthen the technology and data that support them.
Conduct a technology audit to identify gaps that may exist in your current revenue operations tech stack. Then start asking how your organization can close those gaps to help replenish your pipeline – remember to involve your key players: Sales, Marketing and IT. For many companies, this audit might mean investing in marketing automation technology, marketing services, or solutions that clean and enrich data to ensure a proper foundation for revenue generation.
Next, establish a single source of truth for data for all teams connected to revenue operations and ensure that your revenue operations technologies integrate with it well. There must be a devotion to customer data to identify more potential prospects, to improve conversions at each stage of the process through personalization, and to better prioritize sales efforts based on various data sets.
As organizations look to the future, many are left wondering: what’s next? The pandemic dramatically altered the processes of buying and selling forever, and businesses across the globe are looking for a clear path forward. Luckily, there are steps many can take today to mitigate the effects of a looming revenue reckoning. Addressing new buying and selling demands with thoughtful, revenue-centric approaches rooted in technology and interdepartmental unification will be the key to avoiding the fallout of outdated and ineffective business practices.
[To share your insights with us, please write to sghosh@martechseries.com]
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