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Johannes Hoech shares an article that identifies areas to watch and steps to take to control revenue losses and improve growth.

Would you fly in a passenger airplane with multiple, disconnected pilots? One controlling the engines, one for heading, one in charge of fuel, etc. Seems absurd to think that a plane could actually fly this way. But isn’t that analogous how we often set up and run our revenue organizations?

We have a pilot for marketing, one for sales, one for sales operations, and so on. These ‘pilots measure progress separately and differently, often incompatible and often opaque. As a result we are swimming in data but starved for actionable information that allows us to set predictions and then quickly and regularly course correct to achieve our revenue goals.

We regularly see three structural complications that are preventing startups and turnaround from being able to plan and predict growth more accurately:

Sales and marketing silos are hardwired in place by similarly siloed applications

Startups and turnarounds don’t have good enough data for forecasting and analytics

Forecasting is done by extrapolating past data instead of using “adaptive planning”

For item 3 we’ll describe a system for startups and turnarounds to predictively plan and deliver revenue growth since analytics approaches that work for larger organizations break down here.

Mind the Gap – or more – the “MQL-SQL Iron Curtain”

One complication arises from the fact that startup and turnaround companies are ill-served by the sales- and martech applications that hardwire companies into a set of rigid, and fairly incompatible processes. Why do we have, say, Marketo or HubSpot for marketing and Salesforce or Dynamics for sales, and many of those apps are still poorly integrated? Why not integrate the two halves in one app?

Preferably one that can be used by the C-Suite directly, like if a CRO simply wants to know which marketing and sales investments have the best yield? Or how can they double down on those investments and reduce the poorly yielding investments? Instead they need an army of data and revenue operations high priests to tell them, often with too much of a delay.

Any startup or turnaround that’s trying to create a direct data-line of sight between first touch leads at the beginning of their pipeline, and closed won revenue at the end knows how hard it is, in the absence of complete, good and relevant data, to tie every lead source all the way through to revenue through a well-functioning lead-to-sales integration between applications. Never mind the technical challenges of integrating independent applications – even if you could, it’s impossible to do unless you have several quarters of good pipeline generation data available, period. What startup or turnaround has that?”

Key points include:

• Managing expectations

• Improving predictive accuracy

• Detailed metrics

Read the full article, Flying blind? Take back control of your revenue, on Premonio.com.