Revenue Operations

CHAPTER 1Take Control of the Revenue Cycle

Introducing Revenue Operations, a New Way to Create Sustainable, Scalable Growth

Revenue growth – the increase in a company's sales over time – is the primary basis for creating business value. The more sustainable and scalable that growth is, the more valuable your business becomes. Despite this importance, the “science of growth” is not well understood. Most businesses approach growth as a disjointed, episodic activity.

Why? The core reason is that many business owners, CEOs, and leaders lack a practical and proven system for growing their business. Every other primary function in a business – from the procurement, manufacturing, and shipping of products to the management of financial and human resources – has an established system. Purchasing, manufacturing, HR, and finance leaders have spent decades standardizing and automating those systems. Despite that, few of the executives we spoke with could clearly describe any kind of connected approach, system, or model they use to generate the revenue and profit growth they forecast to their investors.

They gave us some pragmatic reasons for this. First, go-to-market processes have proven hard to manage, measure, and systematize because they are more “art” than science. Second, customers and markets change too often and too quickly to create stable, repeatable processes. Third, they lack the customer feedback data needed to anticipate customer needs, measure performance, and manage the ...