It’s a game about data with Revenue Acceleration — but what is it?
In a hyper-connected world, businesses need to be utilizing all the data at their disposal and transforming it into actionable steps. This is particularly true in B2B relationships. Finding those elements to help leverage opportunities can make or break your company’s success moving into the future.
While accumulating data is vital for any modern company, what does it have to do with Revenue Acceleration?
What is Revenue Acceleration?
Revenue Acceleration is simply the process of collecting data from various departments and streamlining processes to generate revenue.
These sources of information can be dredged up from marketing, sales, customer success stories, and other clientele-facing departments to create some revenue (or income) gains.
A well-oiled machine moves forward more efficiently; the same is true for your business.
This, however, requires data. After all, if there’s no data, it’s just an assumption. To achieve the best revenue acceleration feedback loop, you need to ensure you’re picking up every scrap of information you can while still feeding more into the system.
Ensuring that data is fed back into this loop means you can make adjustments and streamline processes between or even within specific departments.
As we mentioned, many departments can feed information into ensuring that the revenue acceleration program is performing at its peak. These include:
Marketing Data
The data fed into the program from this department is sales (what your clients purchased) and customer data (simple questionnaires). By analyzing these data points, you can ensure that your company creates messaging that speaks to your core demographic and increases sales.
Sales Data
When it comes to feeding information from the sales department, you’ll investigate why they are interested in your offering and what value they got from the interaction with your company. With this data, you’ll be able to create better pitches that are informative and valuable.
Customer Success Data
Yes, more data into the program! This time you’ll be looking into customer success, and this is data taken from marketing and sales to understand:
- The value the customer is looking for
- What problems they are trying to solve
- And to get better messaging for upsells as well as cross-sells
When looking through all the data collected during revenue acceleration, you’ll realize it is a lot. However, while it may seem great to have this mountain of insights at your disposal, it can be misleading if you’ve captured insufficient data.
Let’s look at how you can manage this data and sift through it successfully.
Bad data is bad
Revenue acceleration is all about having the data. But if you’re being fed bad data, your actionable plans will be wrong. So ensuring that your systems are optimized to collect this data is critical. And to eliminate any human error, you can utilize AI.
By simply having an AI system capturing data means you can remove errors caused by events such as people changing jobs, data going out of date, and improper entries. Each of these issues can cause several inaccuracies in the data.
This, in turn, will mean there’ll be massive holes in data across teams, accounts, and opportunities, which will lead to mistakes and poorly executed follow-ups.
According to Forester Research, 60% of companies have unreliable data health due to data decay. Unfortunately, this means that you won’t be able to utilize the data to gain current insights.
But if you have an automated CRM data capturing system, you’ll be able to automate this process. And you will also be able to cleanse your data, which should be your first step towards growing your revenue.
Now, ensuring that relationships are managed properly can also be automated with relationship intelligence.
Relationship Intelligence
To ensure your revenue acceleration plan works, you need to plot your organization’s relationships. After all, no company can operate in complete isolation. The ability to organize and analyze all your company’s client relationships in a digestible manner means there’s no poor data, and it’s easy to understand as well as rollout.
Relationship intelligence systems also monitor all your transactional data, social contact, behavior, and the activities your customers have been performing. This makes collecting data easy when planning to apply revenue acceleration strategies.
And when you’re planning on strengthening connections with clients, you need to have the insights at hand about when to leverage opportunities, how to engage, as well as what to engage with.
When this is automated and plotted by AI, and you can see the relationship mapping, you’re well on your way to maximizing profits.
This is achieved by creating lasting relationships, which in turn protects your revenue. AI also helps with growing your referral database while ensuring you increase the number of retained customers.
And retention and referrals are crucial elements when planning on revenue acceleration.
Retain clients and gain referrals
When looking to increase revenues, it is far better to retain clients and gain referrals. However, finding new clientele is a costly exercise and sometimes requires educating them on your product offering.
But by focusing on current clients, who understand your product, you should be upselling to them. Your clients like what you’re offering already, and you have the data on how to sell to them.
Also, trusted clients, or partners, make the best referrals. According to research, 80% of complex purchases simply start with a solid referral. This means that by retaining loyal clients, you’ve kept the best sales personnel to assist you in selling your product to the world.
Making sure you retain clients and gain referrals will automatically help with revenue acceleration.
Utilizing the data required to start revenue acceleration can be a challenge. But if you focus on gathering this data via automated processes and building on existing relationships, which in turn means more referrals, your company will grow its revenue.
Jody Glidden is the founder and CEO of Introhive. Founded in 2012, Introhive is the fastest-growing B2B relationship intelligence service and data management platform. The company was recently recognized by Deloitte’s Fast 50 and Fast 500 Awards and was named the 2020 MarTech Breakthrough Award winner for best CRM Innovation Software.
