Economic news shows tech giants are cutting back their budgets and staff, including highly coveted developers from product engineering teams. The marketing budget is suspected to face some headwinds in 2023 too. However, the most rewarding outcome arises from growth initiatives, not cost reduction, layoffs, or other slash-and-burn strategies. So now’s not the time to curl up in the fetal position! Instead, let’s be bold and build a revenue technology team. The team can either be *instinctools or permanent staff, or it can be your four (qualified) cousins. So, what’s the best way to get ahead of the competition while, given the economic situation, keeping costs under control?
It’s high time to end the chaos and make massive gains in revenue again. The best place to start — your data. Chaos is caused by bad data. Bad data that should never have existed in the first place. Chaos, made by integrations that are no longer in use, SaaS subscriptions that no one touches, etc.
But, when we dig deeper, we get to the heart of what that chaos really is: not having a clue as to where your next largest deal comes from or when it may arrive. Within all of the contacts you’ve collected and across all of the technologies being paid for, no one has the same answer of who is likely to become the next exciting customer and when to expect an even better deal. That’s the turmoil you feel every day. Unless…
A revenue technology team is a group responsible for your sales and marketing technology stack, aka MarTech. This might include a CRM, some call center software, an analytics tool (or three), a contact-information subscription, an email automation tool, etc. The revenue technology team’s job is to make more money sooner and cheaper through the use of technology, documentation, and training.
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For revenue growth, they’ll vastly improve the identification of the very best prospects at the top of the funnel and then move those prospects to closure sooner and for a higher average dollar amount. What would a modest increase, let’s say 15%, in the average order value result in for your company?
Since we’re discussing this on the doorstep of 2023, let’s focus on the savings. Imagine what more automation and more intelligence would do in terms of cost efficiency. Here are some examples:
- What if you cut down your digital ad budget by 20% while surpassing sales goals?
- What if you reduced the number of screens and the number of clicks during an average support staff’s day by 50%?
- What if you could eliminate horrible customers by 90%?
There are a ton of possibilities that are adding up fast. Here’s one more: what are the cost savings if you identified young affordable sales talent and promoted them to leadership positions, who teach even younger, even more affordable employees how to sell better?
These are all real things people attain, which are critical for achieving scale no matter what the year is. The key to massive wins is having a holistic group of professionals working full-time on turbocharging your marketing and sales initiatives. The team basically looks like a software development squad. There’s a person to gather requirements from stakeholders, a person that codes within the platforms and integrates them with others, a person that does data analysis, a person to test the work, and someone to manage the process. Some of the roles can be combined, but you’re looking at a team of 3-5.
And this small team has huge potential. By getting more money in the door sooner and for less cost and effort, they will provide the throughput needed to hit evermore challenging goals, is revenue throughput. There are two ways to increase throughput. You can either scrape away at the pipe’s walls bit by bit with a hanger you untwisted or install a bigger pipe. Seems like a no-brainer, doesn’t it? The latter option is much more favorable in terms of time and effort investments.
During any year-end, the time most suitable for setting new ambitious resolutions for the coming year, all CMOs should not only dream about, but advocate for a revenue technology team of their own. One that will not get sucked into product engineering and be obsessed with revenue operations. 2023 is no exception for this encouragement, and it’s a great year to highlight how a revenue technology team will improve the bottom line.
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