Brewed Fresh Daily

Assuming you�d like to improve your overall revenue generation process, you need to know where to start. The following approach has worked for service firms, and can work for you. 1. Change the premise. Enter this process with the premise that both marketing and sales have one purpose: generate maximum revenue for the firm. If defensiveness and bickering are allowed to continue between marketing and selling, your process improvement progress will be greatly hindered. 2. Add up the costs. Add up everything you are spending on sales and marketing now. Don�t forget to include everything like management time, salaries, and overhead. 3. Categorize. Assign each dollar you are spending to specific tasks designed to produce specific outputs. Force yourself to categorize the costs and place them into buckets. 4. Challenge each cost. Find out what is really working (not just what everyone thinks is working) and what is not. Find out what you can do for less cost and time while achieving the same results. Be diligent about supporting every assertion and assumption with clearly measurable and defensible facts. 5. Plug leaks. Stop spending money on what is not working. If you don�t take active and decisive action to stop spending on unproductive or unnecessary activities, useless dollars will perpetually leak out of your profits. 6. Focus on goals. Establish clear, integrated goals and targets for each sales and marketing task and activity. No dollars should be spent frivolously on tactics that don�t work. No new dollars and new strategies should be engaged without success measures. Everything must have a measurable goal. 7. Communicate. Make sure that everyone involved understand those goals, why they are important, and how each person is connected to the tasks, goals, and firm�s success. 8. Implement. Service companies have a tendency to let bold projects, plans, and goals fade away like old soldiers. Implement with commitment. Of course, this is easier said than done, but implementation assurance is a topic for another article. 9. Measure. Measure your results. 10. Repeat. Start the process again (hopefully at step 2 this time), and don�t stop repeating the process. Make measurable continuous improvement in marketing and sales a part of your culture. It�s hard work, yes. What worth doing isn�t? But once you engage the process, you will be surprised at how much time, cash, and sanity you gain. Great service companies have a continuously improving, integrated marketing and sales engine designed to generate maximum revenue for the company.