The Revenue Acceleration Manifesto

Sellers Are Less Present at the Critical Inflection Points Along The Buying Journey

In 1988 Neil Rackham released the most extensive study into successful selling with the book Spin Selling. He introduced the importance of creating value through the sale. He found that the highest form of value creation available to sales organizations (it applies to marketing organizations) occurs when they help buyers understand a problem they have that they either didn’t know about or didn’t fully understand.

This finding was confirmed and reinforced with The Challenger Sale (2011) study that was even more extensive than Rackham’s. The research findings’ central thesis was that salespeople who teach the prospect something about their business, tailor their pitch, and control the sales process are disproportionately likely to succeed.

More recently, from The Aberdeen Group’s 2019 report Demystifying B2B Purchase Intent Data:

73% of buyers are willing to meet with salespeople earlier than the consideration phase if they:

• Help them define their problems & needs
• Tell them something they didn’t know about the buyer’s category or competitors
• Provide objective information and help them frame their decision
• Challenge their way of doing business by highlighting a pain point or organizational need they weren’t aware of

That’s 41 years of proof, yet a study by Challenger, Inc found that sellers only play a role in helping buyers with problem identification 11% of the time. 

Making matters worse, the current investments and approaches dominating today’s sales and marketing organizations continue to amplify this dangerous trend.

Consensus-Based Decision-Making Is Becoming The Dominant Buying Style

Ten years ago, the path to successful selling was to stake out the critical decision-maker, stimulate awareness, quantify the problem, and convince her that a change was needed. Candidly, that approach never worked as well as sellers thought it did, but today it’s one of the fastest paths to an expensive failure.

The average number of direct influencers (decision-makers) involved in a b2b purchase decision has increased by 25%, growing from 5.4 - 6.8, all with different and often conflicting objectives & priorities. The complication associated with so many influencers is one of the main reasons that nearly 40% of b2b buying processes end in “no decision.”

For most businesses, the problems they are addressing and the required solutions are far too complex and nuanced and will impact multiple areas of the company. No one person can understand and navigate it all. 

Successfully navigating such a journey requires a highly orchestrated combination of people, process, and content from the selling organization, increasing the costs and risks associated with the sales effort.

Sales, Marketing & Customer Success Processes, Bogged Down Dealing with Complexity, Are Forced to Pay a High “Friction Tax”

Over the last couple of years, we’ve had the opportunity to analyze nearly 200 companies’ sales efforts varying in size from 2 - 500 salespeople in more than 15 industries. With only a couple of exceptions, all of these companies were doing well, experiencing growth rates above industry averages. What’s striking is how poorly these companies are leveraging the sales and marketing investments, assets, and efforts. We routinely see results that are 1/2 - 2/3 of what they should be, given the size of their sales and marketing teams and investments. 

Yes, these companies are growing, but they’re paying a significant tax, what we’ve dubbed a “Friction Tax,” for that growth. We’ve discovered the most significant difference between high-performing companies and those performing slightly above average is this utilization rate. Simply put, the best companies are effectively managing the friction that naturally occurs in growing organizations, and everyone isn’t.

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There’s A New Game, And Winning It Requires A New Mindset & Approach

”In business, the new game begins before the old one ends” - Clayton Christensen, author & Harvard Business School professor

The game businesses are playing has changed. There are new rules, new risks, and new stakes. For decades businesses have paid lip service to the idea that the customer is everyone’s boss. Today your business better be taking that adage seriously. And I’ve got some news, our boss - the customer - is fickle, demanding, and often has unreasonable expectations.

Winning this new game requires a transformation in mindset and approach.

• From a focus on speed to a focus on velocity: speed is a measurement of how fast you’re moving, velocity measures how quickly you’re progressing towards a specific point. In the old game, it was good enough to be overly focused on speed. Today’s game is too complicated, dynamic, and nuanced for speed alone to get the job done.
  
  
• Shifting from levering Big Data and utilizing Little Data: In her book Thinking in Bets, author and former World Series of Poker Tournament of Champions winner Annie Duke shared that outcomes are determined by two variables: decision quality and luck. The only variable businesses can directly impact is decision quality. In the December 2013 Harvard Business Review article You May Not Need Big Data After All, the authors shared that data’s primary value is improving decision quality. While that statement may seem obvious, few companies are using it effectively. The authors called for an approach they call “evidence-based decision making.” We call it Hypothesis Driven Growth. Companies and individuals that embrace hypotheses driven decision making will accelerate velocity with less effort. Those that don’t will continually be forced to work harder for diminishing returns.
  
  
• Away from bloated, redundant Horizontal Tech Stacks to tight, purposeful Vertical Tech Stacks: Here’s a Twitter post that, without meaning to, is the most accurate statement of the technology trend in sales and marketing over the last decade. This tweet aims to define the sales essentials, listing 12 applications - TWELVE!! I don’t know what’s worse, the fact that this only represents one segment of the sales, marketing, and success processes, or that I can quickly identify five applications that are missing.
  
  Here’s the reality, 99.8% of sales organizations don’t need 12 applications to accelerate their sales efforts. As technology budgets have exploded, company leaders realize that the only measurable impact these “investments” have generated is greater SaaS subscription costs. A few years ago, a study showed that their conversion rates went down as companies spent more on sales and marketing tech. In the new game, it’s not a question of how much technology you have; it’s a question of how are you utilizing the technology you do have? 

• From an obsession with efficiency to a focus on aligning vectors: Sales and marketing in the 21st century can be described as an obsessive pursuit of efficiency. It is undoubtedly true that many aspects of the customer and revenue acquisition and expansion areas are far less efficient than they should be. The problem is that organizations are pursuing efficiency as though the desired outcome/objective is greater efficiency. You can see it in the key metrics that increasingly dominate dashboards, reporting, comp plans, the implemented structures, and the tactics that permeate the entire process.
  
  The current state today reminds me of the problems the manufacturing industry had to confront in the 1980s. Manufacturers used to obsess about efficiency too. As a result, they got good at being efficient. The problem they encountered was the more efficient they got, the more money they lost, and they became less responsive to changing circumstances, which multiplied the impact of those losses.
  What the manufacturing industry learned is what sales organizations need to know to win in this new game. Efficiency is only a means; throughput should be the outcome/objective. Businesses must focus on aligning their vectors to account for and mitigate the various bottlenecks and constraints inherent in rich, complex, adaptive systems like the market.
  
  
• Away from silos to orchestrated action: For most of the 20th-century, sales and marketing teams worked in clearly defined roles that, while complementary, were easily separated. Marketing was responsible for the early part of the customer acquisition process, and sales own the later part. The Internet and greater competition disrupted all of that, leading to a shift in how these groups worked. Rather than the linear path of old, they had to work more in a parallel manner. Despite all the rhetoric and content about sales and marketing alignment, these teams still operate, primarily as separate silos.
  
  Winning the new game will require companies to position, market, and sell themselves in new, complex ways. The demands of the new game are far too much for mere alignment to be enough. The companies that win the game will see marketing and sales working in highly orchestrated ways. Managing such orchestration without it devolving into chaos or confusion will become one of the primary leadership demands.

• Away from managing behavior to systems & design thinking: In their peak years, IBM built the greatest sales organization in the world’s history. They did it by creating a superior system, not by hiring superior salespeople. They followed the path recommended by Peter Drucker and built the genius into the system.
  
  I’ve spent more than 30 years in the sales industry, working in just about every facet of the sales echelon. One of my most significant observations is that salespeople get far more credit than they deserve when sales are good and far too much blame when they’re not. I’ve learned that it’s far better to be an average salesperson in a superior system than a great salesperson in an average one.
  The challenge presented by the new game is that the customer/revenue acquisition and expansion systems have become far more complex, dynamic, and adaptive. This makes building a sustainable system harder than ever. The winners of the new game will embrace systems and design thinking. In much the same way that business model innovation has been the primary competitive advantage for companies in the past decade, a complex systems approach will become a critical competitive advantage in the next.
  
  
• Less of “doing more” and More about managing friction: At Lift, we like to talk about a companies growth efforts using the metaphor of a flywheel. Historically the go-to play of successful organizations was to increase the force used to move the flywheel. By and large, this has worked for the organizations that have done it well. The problem is that after some progress, increasing force reaches a diminishing point of returns. As you apply more and more force, gains diminish.
  The new game will see a second play dominate. The winners of the new game will manage friction to achieve their desired outcomes with less effort.

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Go-To-Market Strategy & Messaging

A healthy revenue growth effort originates from a robust go-to-market strategy and messaging. This consists of GX elements:

1. Economic Model
2. Business Strategy
3. Positioning & Messaging

Your go-to-market strategy frames everything you do and serves as a “true north” to manage the multitude of trade-offs and decisions that will be made.

The Approach: The Playbooks

Every company and individual has a “way” of doing what they do. Every organization, including yours, has a modus operandi (MO). The question you need to answer is how intentional and aligned your MO is.

I refer to the MO, or approach, as your playbook. To be clear, everyone has a playbook; the problem is that it’s rarely documented or purposeful. 

Today’s market complexity is far too significant to rely on “feeling your way” or making things up as you go along. The playbook is your opportunity to document the best approaches and eliminate the friction that regularly bogs down execution. 

In The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization, author Peter Senge highlighted the importance of highly adaptive organizations. He dubbed these as “learning organizations” because of their ability to quickly and effectively synthesize the learning from each individual’s experience across the organization, enabling them to transform themselves to be more agile continuously. Maintaining a healthy playbook is a crucial component of being a learning organization.

Execution

“Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.” - Mike Tyson

In the end, it’s what you do, not what you plan to do, that determines your outcomes. Winning with today’s customers requires extensive orchestration between sales, marketing, operations, technology, and more. 

The markets we compete in today are complex, dynamic, and adaptive. This means there is no one strategy or path to success. The rate of change today is extraordinary, and it’s only increasing.

The battle cry of today’s buyers and sellers is simple - Don’t Make Me Think. Yet far too often, that’s precisely what companies’ approaches to execution do. Rather than designing and structuring up-front, we allow conflicts to appear and be resolved at the performance point. This type of friction extracts value, slows things down, and drains the resources businesses need to thrive.

On the other hand, a well structured and designed framework ensures that vectors are aligned, activities are orchestrated, freeing up the space needed to execute effortlessly. Adjustments are continuously made, and trade-offs are managed proactively to enable people to build momentum.

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Tactical vs. Strategic Revenue Operations

Today revenue operations is among the fastest-growing disciplines in sales and marketing. It’s important to note that not all revenue operations mindsets are the same. We recently shared a post highlighting The Five Levels of Revenue Operations. The key takeaway from our research is the difference between a tactical and strategic revenue operations focus:

• Tactical RevOps: focus on efficiency
• Strategic RevOps: focus on vector alignment and outcomes

There are only two activities that can increase your momentum. They are to increase force or reduce friction. Increasing force (doing more) quickly hits the points of diminishing returns. When the focus is on “more,” costs go up, as does the complexity. When you’re focused on force, the increased friction eliminates much of the value you seek to create.

Reducing friction enables the entire organization. It makes everything you do more efficient and usually more effective. It allows people to get more from the time and effort they put forth, and it gives the organization more stability.

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Battling The Whirlwind: Building a Base For Continuous & Sustained Improvement

Success is easy, but so is Neglect. - Jim Rohn

We’ve met very few people who disagree with the importance of the seven disciplines listed above. Still, we’ve met even fewer that have fully implemented the type of approach we describe here. The good news is that those that have enjoyed better outcomes with less effort.

However, the question is why a few only implement principles like those described here rather than most. The answer is quite simple. It’s what we like to call the whirlwind. The whirlwind represents the thousands of things that have to get done just to keep the business running. It’s the tyranny of the urgent that dominates everyone’s days and the massive inertia of the status quo.

There’s a feeling that there’s too much to do right now to address these principles adequately. Besides, most of these issues don’t feel that big at any given time (the invisible rarely does), so the investments required to eliminate the slowing us down are sacrificed to today’s needs. 

The problem is that the whirlwind feeds upon itself, making the job even harder.

This is why Strategic Revenue Operations is a mission-critical function for companies that are serious about growth. A Strategic RevOps team is working on your sales, marketing, and success systems and processes, while everyone else is working in them. 

RevOps is a “sharpening the saw” discipline. If you’re still thinking, “we’ve just got too much going on right now,” or “this sounds great for the long-term, but we need results fast,” accept that you are the frustrated lumberjack in the parable complaining about all the wood he needs to cut.

The (not-so-)secret to accelerating growth and profit is to build a strong foundation making ongoing, consistent improvements. Just as the British Cycling Team learned, getting from mediocre to great isn’t about making giant leaps; it’s about continually making marginal gains in multiple areas.