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

Chapter 20

Technology for the Revenue Process

You may have noticed that I’ve hardly said anything about technology and systems—until this point. That was intentional. The business transformation and continuous improvement that Revenue Performance Management requires isn’t about deploying a new technology system. It is about people, processes, metrics, creative content, and a culture of continuous improvement. But, as with almost any aspect of modern life, we need technology to support the business processes involved with RPM.

In principle, managers at GE could keep their books without an ERP system, and just use ledger books and an army of accountants. But today, even the smallest businesses no longer use manual methods to keep their books, given the abundance of inexpensive, easy-to-use software available for that purpose.

The same basic idea applies to Revenue Performance Management. Since we are talking about digital marketing—websites, Google search, social media, e-mail, and the like—there are going to be computers and software involved in the process. But in concept, a company could implement most of the business processes described in Part III of this book using largely manual methods. They could capture new leads acquired from inbound marketing and store them in spreadsheets or on a personal database such as Microsoft Access. A legion of marketers could review the leads every day, deciding whom to keep in touch with as part of their lead nurturing programs, and then calculate ...