When it comes to the quickest route to revenue, here’s what has worked for the B2B & B2G tech companies that I’ve worked with
1. Monetizing Delivered Value
2. Partnerships / Alliances
3. Existing pipeline – rationalization
The underlying premise common in all these, is that all the activities required to
– identify the right people
– getting access to them
– establishing trust
in order to talk about underlying pain & possible solutions, has already been done to an extent.
1. Monetizing Delivered Value
90-100% revenue through free inbound – that’s what three (niche) companies that I’ve interacted with have achieved.
This is nothing more than a fancy way of saying upselling, cross-selling & referrals.
For SaaS, empirically knowing when your customers get their Eureka moment and speeding up that journey is critical to finding PMF quickly (further reading: Mark Roberge, Stage2 Capital). What’s equally important is to put in hooks for referrals etc. once you’ve done that.
For services companies, the workflow is around the delivery, capture, validation & communication of delivered value. I haven’t seen many companies have a formal process around this. Gartner does this brilliantly well.
2. Partnerships / Alliances
Partnerships are hard to crack – but they’re definitely worth it. Accessing new markets or accelerating reach in existing ones – there’re few GTMs that’re as cost & time efficient.
For SaaS, some foundational steps (depending on ACV etc.) include analysing your own tech stack to identify potential alliances, partners & marketplaces. The next step depends on a more comprehensive understanding of your client to know the underlying need for your solution and the accompanying consultancy, hardware, software that’ll be purchased by the client. Post-identification, the actual outreach (recipient, value-prop, message, automation), enablement (collateral, training, incentives) and internal org (people, KPIs, process, tech) follow.
For Services, the basic elements as mentioned above still apply.
3. Existing Pipeline – Rationalization
Before we even talk about this, quick question …
If 5 of your salespeople were asked the criteria for an opportunity to be at a particular sales stage, how many answers will you get?
Ideally, you should get only one, but it’s seldom that case.
This step requires your CRM data to be consistent which in itself is a function of people, process & tech.
If a prospective client decided that you weren’t a good functional fit and decided to go another way, there’re less chances of success reaching out to them.
If the rejection reason was bad timing or budget, then depending on your outreach timing, you can get some accelerated wins.
Interested to discuss or know more? Come interact with me on LinkedIn.