A CEO scrolls through LinkedIn between meetings, coffee number seven in hand, and the promises keep coming. “Grow your sales with X.” “Double-digit growth when you adopt Y.” “Install Z on your website and double your conversions.”
Inside the company the pressure is the same. The growth marketer wants a chatbot on the website. The sales team wants a better CRM. Marketing communications wants budget for more content to drive traffic.
None of these are bad ideas. The problem is that on their own, they are tools. A tool is not a strategy, and buying a blender in the hope of losing weight sets you up to fail.
Without a strategy behind them, new tools waste money, pull people in the wrong direction and, at worst, annoy the very customers you are trying to win.
Why this is the CEO’s job
Fixing this is not a sales or marketing decision. It changes how the whole company goes to market. In most B2B companies, the go-to-market model still looks something like this:
- We have a product or service.
- Marketing tells the world about it.
- Marketing defines the ideal customer profile.
- Sales researches those companies.
- Sales tries to reach the decision makers.
- Marketing produces more messaging.
- Sales keeps pushing prospects through the funnel.
And so on, for a very long time.
A modern revenue engine works differently. It changes how the company approaches sales, marketing, customer success, product development and leadership. That is a decision only the CEO can make.
Start with the fundamentals
The shift starts with a few basic questions:
- What value do we create for our customers?
- Where do our customers look for information?
- How do we provide that information?
- How do we measure the impact?
- What happens after each interaction?
- How smooth is the whole process?
The answers are specific to your business. You know your company and your customers, so nobody can answer them for you. Once you see how the pieces fit together, you also see how to move from today’s processes to a better way of working.
A strategy is a map. To draw it, you need to know where you are starting from, what the terrain looks like and how others move in the same space.
The Revenue Generation Framework™ is that map. In the next seven posts I go through it layer by layer, starting from the foundation: value.