Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Chapter 10

The First, Crucial Step

Committing to Fundamental Change

We are living, marketing, and selling in a brave new world, one where buyers determine their own brand preferences, research their own alternatives, ask friends about vendor qualifications, learn about pricing, and consent to talk to a salesperson only on their own timeline and terms. We have seen how this new mode of buying has run headlong into hidebound marketing and sales practices that have not really changed much over the past 50 years. This clash of styles has created an enormous challenge for companies everywhere. But we have also seen the promise: Companies that embark on fundamental change in the ways they create revenue have the opportunity to unleash a radically higher performance revenue channel, take share from competitors, and achieve outsized revenue acceleration of 40 percent or more.

The issue is real. The opportunity is huge. The strategy is concrete and actionable. Yet we all know that change is hard, even when we know it’s change for the better. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have Jenny Craig and Nutrisystem and Lean Cuisine all helping us lose weight; we wouldn’t have SmokeEnders and Nicorette gum and QuitNet to help us stop smoking; and we wouldn’t have over 262,000 self-help books available from Amazon.com.

However, as with so many other aspirations for change and improvement in our lives, we sometimes need both a carrot and a stick to spur us into action. Just as the threat of heart disease can ...