When did you consider yourself an adult? Was it when you got your first car? Maybe when you received your first paycheck?
Though the age of maturity differs for everyone, most enter adulthood with the same ideology: it’s time to grow up. We become responsible and start making smarter choices that’ll impact our futures.
For the most part, revenue maturity in business is similar to the blurred lines between childhood and adulthood — painful at times, but more than worth it once you’re there.
Is your company ready for revenue maturity? Let’s first look at what it is and its avoidable pitfalls.
What Is Revenue Maturity?
In its simplest terms, revenue maturity is peak strategic alignment of your marketing and sales departments, resulting in steady, predictable revenue growth. It’s the process of defining your company and setting a course to, eventually, get to a place where your company’s sales and marketing strategies have been fully defined.
And though not every organization uses the same five-level revenue growth maturity model, the overall premise is the same. When you’re just beginning to map out your plan for revenue maturity, everything is disorganized and unstable — and that’s okay. From there, you need to develop strategies and processes that work (both externally and internally) together toward a common goal.
Revenue Maturity Pitfalls
But it’s not always an easy process.
Revenue maturity can feel long and laborious — more of a marathon than a sprint — and can be especially damaging to your business if done without a little forethought. While running out of funding and revenue is a surefire way to go out of business, companies also fail to reach revenue maturity for more complicated reasons, including these three common ones:
1. Little or no market
As your company grows, so, too, does the industry and market. New tech, economic changes, and global pandemics will always affect the way we do business. To prepare for unforeseen but inevitable change, ask yourself
- Is there a market for what I’m selling?
- Will there always be a market for what I’m selling?
- Can I adapt my product as the market changes?
- Will what I’m selling always be profitable?
If the answer is “no” to any of those questions, rethink your product or service before you go all in.
2. Unsound business model
If the cost of acquiring your customer (CAC) is higher than the lifetime value of that customer (LTV) — or if you have never even heard of either of those terms — your business is in trouble. To make consistent money long-term, you need to both acquire and retain customers in a scalable way. In other words, make money from them for less than how you acquire them.
3. Speedy over-expansion
Listen, we get it. You’re doing well, making money, and ready to keep that train heading into Success Station. But if you have more orders than you can fulfill, an ill-timed product launch, or way more inventory than you need, you’re going to crash and burn before you’re even off the ground. Slow and steady wins the revenue maturity race, so let a solid, quality customer base, consistent cash flow, and strong data and analysis lead the way.
Unsure if your company is ready for revenue maturity? Whether you’re the CEO, CMO, or VP of Sales, it’s important to ask yourself some questions first:
- Do we as a company fully understand revenue maturity?
- Do we know where we fall on the revenue growth maturity model?
- Is our organization prepared for it?
- What changes do we need to implement (processes, software, tech) to get everyone ready and on board to reach revenue maturity?
The answers lie in 10 attributes high-performing revenue teams should have in common across three key areas.
The million-dollar question is, does your company have them, too?
What High-Performing Revenue Teams Have in Common
Revenue Leadership
1. Team Readiness
Reaching success and growth is impossible without a strong support system. (We’re not just talking about able and willing long-term employees. If you don’t even have that in place, your company isn’t ready for revenue maturity.) If your team is composed of good, loyal employees with aligned leadership, shared goals and outcomes, relevant skills, and, most importantly, openness to change, then you’re on the right track to revenue maturity.
2. Market Clarity
Market clarity is a non-negotiable attribute on the road to revenue maturity. The more you understand your company’s target market — using both strong, well-defined ideal customer profiles and tiered, high-quality target account lists, for example — the more successful you’ll be in the long run.
In fact, multinational conglomerate corporation Honeywell is proof of how effective and influential market clarity can be. By knowing the ins and outs of their target market, Honeywell aligned their sales and marketing departments and introduced tools like value propositions and differentiated positioning to their campaigns for impressive growth.
Revenue Processes
3. Base Business
When gauging your readiness for revenue maturity, you’d be remiss to ignore your company’s base business, including your market share, recorded revenue and margin, customer concentration, and competitiveness. For example, in comparing your profit to your sales, how are you faring? And, speaking of revenue, is it spread across many customers or attributed instead to a single client or small batch of them? The more you understand and meet the needs of your customer base, the closer you are to reaching revenue maturity.
4. Market Engagement
Leveraging effective marketing processes — target audience segmentation and rich content, for instance — you’ll not only find and engage customers but you’ll secure and retain them as well. (By rethinking their customer experience and implementing ABM, cloud data warehouse Snowflake became a premier example of effective market engagement in real-time.) As personalized marketing becomes more of the norm (not to mention the reason for a 5% to 10% increase in revenue), you need market engagement to attain revenue maturity.
5. Surfacing Prospects
In case you were unaware, the customer is king, regardless of size or industry. So, to prioritize them — while you identify and hone in on ideal, high-quality leads who are most likely to make a purchase — it’s vital to use strategies such as target account lists, multiple buyer personas, lead qualification, and inbound/outbound integrations.
6. Closing Cadence
Closing cadence measures workplace efficiency through target account awareness, customer’s buying process mapping, and partnership selling. When sales and marketing teams work together to meet their shared goals and deadlines, revenue maturity is on the horizon. This ideal situation allows everyone to focus more on closing deals — with streamlined sales automation, for example.
7. Account Stewardship
Once your team has successfully landed a client, how do they handle them? Each client should feel you’ve had the carpet rolled out for them. (Fun fact: Implementing ABM solutions within your company helps account stewardship since it focuses your marketing and sales departments on the goal of interacting with key accounts). If you’re unsure whether you can improve your client management (hint: you probably can), map out your post-sale process and customer lifetime value to ensure your core base is saving you both time and money. Then, you can figure out where to focus your employees’ efforts.
Revenue Technology
8. Measurable Outcomes
Without outcomes — specific, realistic data that tell you where your business stands — you’ll never know where your company can go. If you don’t have any measurable tools like revenue attribution models or KPIs and performance dashboards in place, hop to it. By setting up technology that measures when and how you can reach your goals, you can more easily see what’s next.
9. Data Integrity
Clean, secure, complete data is absolutely critical to succeed. And grow. And thrive. Honestly, having inaccurate, dirty data may be worse than not having any data at all to measure outcomes or aid in decision-making. To maintain a clean database — and ensure you’re ready for revenue maturity — implement data hygiene practices like structural principles such as a single point of truth and integrated data models.
10. Revenue Tech Stack
A revenue tech stack ensures your workforce — primarily your sales and marketing teams — can work together effectively and effectively. Without some form of integrable, innovative ABM platform and tech stack in place, your climb to revenue maturity will be much harder (and less likely).
Similar to when you were a kid and you couldn’t wait to be an adult, you’re probably itching to reach [revenue] maturity.
Though it’s a lofty goal (and a lot of hard work), the pros of revenue maturity far outweigh the cons, including consistent, strong revenue quality and quantity. You don’t want to rush it, especially if you’re just starting out, don’t have a ton of employees, or have barely turned a profit. But the good news? It’s not a zero sum game — everyone starts somewhere.
If you read through this list and want to get started on your journey or believe you should be at revenue maturity — but aren’t — let RollWorks help get you there, whether you need help harnessing data, building a multi-channel martech stack, or anything in between.
