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

There’s More to the Revenue Cycle Story

This book explains that today’s buyer is indisputably in control of his or her own learning process, from the earliest stages of research through to the final purchase. They carry this process out on their own terms and their own timeline. Virtually every buying engagement nowadays starts with a web search, a question posed in one of the social media networks, or a similar interaction with a different prospective vendor. This means that buyers first interact with information resources and programs managed by the vendor’s marketing team.

Therefore, virtually every revenue cycle starts with the marketing department; only later does it find its way over to the sales team. A salesperson might think they’ve initiated a sales cycle by placing a cold call; however, the buyer has almost certainly been primed to take the call as a result of his or her earlier interaction with a website, an ad, or some other marketing-sponsored activity.

Viewed through the buyer’s eyes, it’s easy to see why the notion of a sales cycle is a seriously flawed way of understanding how revenue gets created. After all, to the buyer the start of a sales cycle is simply an arbitrary point somewhere in the middle of their buying process. And there is no good reason for the seller to think that the activities that take place after this arbitrary point are somehow more important to the revenue process than those that happened earlier. In fact, as we’ll explore a little later, ...