How Can You Create Predictable Sales Revenue?

Selling is every business’  lifeblood and plight.

Without revenue generation, any business endeavor is bound to fail. But when a business can forecast the amount of revenue it can generate each month, quarter, or even year, chaos can be reduced, and the organization will be in a better position to make confident decisions and plans to scale and grow.

Most likely, in this case, the organization has already laid out a predictable revenue model. In the absence of prediction, there is no direction. It means we need to figure out where we’re going, how we’re going to get there, and what it will take to get there.

If your business hasn’t created a predictable revenue model yet, this article may be of help. You will not only know what predictable revenue is, the benefits it offers, and the terms you need to know.

But first things first. What is the meaning of Predictable Sales Revenue?

What is Predictable Sales Revenue?

The Predictable Sales Revenue is a structure coined by Aaron Ross, the best-selling author of Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com.

Predicable sales revenue or predictable revenue model is a framework that businesses use to forecast future earnings and increase revenue. This entails determining the average revenue generated by the company over time to determine how these can be improved moving forward.

A predictive revenue model incorporates historical sales data, the time and resources required to increase sales, marketing strategies, and the time lag between investments and profits. Understanding these components can assist you in structuring sales and marketing teams to generate and track predictable revenue or revenue that you can expect each year.

Benefits of using predictable revenue models include the establishment of benchmarks or baseline revenue that you can expect in a given period which can help you plan your expenditures around the minimum you might generate in that given duration.

You can also increase your revenue since understanding your predictable revenue allows you to evaluate steps that can be done to increase revenue. Also, using predictable revenue, you can better evaluate your sales and marketing strategies leading to the needed improvement of these strategies.

And while you are going through the various steps in the evaluation of your predictable revenue, you may also be benefited from any captured metrics, such as knowing your advertisement expenses and the number of cold calls made, which may help you gauge success.

Predictable Sales Revenue – Terms You Need ToKnow

1. Cold Calling 2.0

“Cold Calling 2.0” is a prospecting method in which a representative contacts the direct manager of a decision-maker they’re interested in and requests them to recommend them to the appropriate person.

This method intends to know that you are getting in touch with the right individual and that such a person knows you already the time you connect, hoping that a time has already been allotted to converse with you before the actual conversation.

2. Layers of the Onion

This is an analogy to assist teams in determining how to “layer out” their products or services. The idea is to make it less troublesome for prospects to determine how they will learn about a firm and its products in a step-by-step manner.

3. Sales Development Representative

These are sales representatives who specialize in “Cold Calling 2.0” and “outbound sales,” and they are in charge of creating outbound leads rather than closing deals or qualifying inbound prospects.

4. Market Response Representative

Incoming leads received by the business via phone or website are qualified by Market Response Representatives. They are the ones who assign qualified opportunities to quota-carrying salespeople.

5. Hot Coals

The term “Hot Coals” pertains to a specific period in the sales cycle that is marred with uneasiness, dormancy, and uncertainty before a sales organization transitions to proactive growth from limited organic growth.  The Predictable Revenue model intends to help businesses in navigating through such stretches.

How Can You Create Predictable Sales Revenue?

If you are convinced that having a predictable revenue model benefits you, consider the following steps below in creating a model for you.

1. Review your present strategies.

You can better execute the necessary restructuring of roles and determination of your predictable revenue once you have a deeper understanding of how your department currently operates.

Hence, you must consider checking on your organization’s existing marketing strategies, the specific processes being adhered to by your sales representatives, and the team members that fulfill each. And to help you establish your benchmarks and goals, make time to know the particular revenue generated with each.

2. Enforce new sales and marketing processes.

After you’ve evaluated your existing processes, assess how your brand is being marketed through your various channels, which may include websites, social media marketing, email marketing, and advertisements.

Think of better ways to educate the target customers of your brand, engage the existing customer, and separate your product or company from the competition. Every marketing channel can help potential clients know about your business and products, as well as engage with your brand.

For sales, you can set up organized procedures for planning, prospecting, promoting your products, and following up.

With each of these stages in the outlined process, you can guarantee consistent organizational processes that will help you anticipate revenue more accurately.

3. Establish your sales and marketing goals.

Setting sales and marketing goals is essential for establishing predictable revenue since it allows you to examine the desired outcome of your efforts.

Determine the expected number of clicks and website visits your new marketing methods will produce, as well as how many contacts attempts your sales representatives will make before a product is sold.

A change that you could adopt for the predictable revenue model is to have your salespeople send out more emails and reduce them instead of taking numerous cold calls. This enables you to improve your automation to reach more clients and call prospective clients who are already acquainted with your organization or product.

4. Reorganize the marketing and sales teams.

A business may reorganize its sales and marketing teams to devise a predictable revenue model.

You may, for example, assign a new role for a marketing response representative. This individual can handle inbound requests or questions from leads or people interacting with marketing content. This role can be used to replace the cold-calling tasks for every potential person on a cold-calling list, standardizing this stage of the process.

The marketing response representative can then provide the sales representatives with qualifying leads to confirm sales.

5. Make training opportunities available.

Since the implementation of this model in the sales and marketing departments necessitates several changes, providing each team member with training opportunities can help ensure their respective success.

To prepare everyone for their tasks, consider training about the new processes, responsibilities, or product knowledge. Training programs, in addition to helping employees meet the company objectives, can also give them a chance to enhance their skills and performance.

6. Monitor progress.

Once you’ve implemented this model, you may monitor your progress to make sure you’re on course to reach your objectives.

Sharing both process goals, such as revenue targets and the number of emails sent, can help ensure that everyone on the team knows their responsibilities. With the help of this new framework, you will be able to anticipate potential monthly revenue more readily and make ongoing adjustments to your procedures to meet and surpass these objectives.

Consider implementing a metric tracking process that enables team members to evaluate their actual performance to their planned performance to determine that everyone is on pace to reach their objectives and that doing so will result in the anticipated income.

7. Check your technological requirements.

The effectiveness of the predictable revenue model can be improved once you have the technology to facilitate your processes, data tracking, and team responsibilities.

To help sales and marketing teams perform more effectively, think about investing in modern technologies such as sales platforms, customer relationship management tools, and billing technology. You may also want to look at automation tools that your teams can use in automatically sending emails to target clients, responding to customer comments, or giving updates on client orders so that the amount of manual labor your internal teams have to do is reduced.

More Tips To Grow Your Business

The Predictable revenue model is just one of the various ways that can help you grow your business. Here are some other ways of scaling your business that do not involve seeking sales leads.

1. Set up a cold email campaign.

Instead of cold calling your prospective clients, the alternative thing to do is use cold email. Your email,  which is a direct line of communication, is just like cold calling that directly brings your message across to your target customers.

Setting up a cold email campaign is pretty simple, and you can expedite the process by automating a few steps, such as gathering contact data, writing engaging email templates, and setting automatic follow-ups.

Once you have the contact information for key decision-makers, you can leverage a cold email tool to send out emails at scale and contact far more decision-makers than you could over the phone.

2. Generate inbound leads using content marketing.

Rather than having to reach out directly to prospects like you do with cold calling and even with cold emailing, you can use content marketing to bring them to you.

Content marketing is being used by 91% of B2B marketers. And if you are still not among them, perhaps it is now the time to revisit the allocation of your marketing budget.

By creating content that concentrates on your customers’ queries, pain points, and interests, you can steadily improve your stream of site visitors within a few months. You can then show them what can be done and why your brand is worthy of their trust.

3. Make use of referral marketing.

Word of mouth and referrals are compelling influences on purchase decisions. These are the driving factor behind an estimated 20-50% of all purchase decisions. You have to request your satisfied customers to give positive feedback to their friends, officemates, and other people around them who may need your product or service.

You can do referral marketing by offering add-ons or benefits as a reward to customers for referring others. Another way of increasing your referrals is by providing exceptional customer solutions and service.

4. Applying for tax credits and incentive programs for research and development.

Businesses should take advantage of government programs that directly or indirectly benefit them. In particular, consider applying for programs giving tax refunds if it is available in your country.

In Canada, for example, the government has the SR&ED or Scientific Research and Experimental Development. This is Canada’s most valuable research and development tax credit program and its way of giving back to business entities that conduct research and development.

Conclusion

The Predictable Sales Revenue model is a gem that every business must take advantage of. Predicting incoming revenues, among other methods objectively, helps bring forth invaluable benefits leading to the business’s continued growth. Creating your predictable revenue model is a must-have for your business and is worth every trouble that comes along the way.