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

Why Does Revenue Performance Management Need a System?

I was lucky to be born at a date early enough that I can remember comedienne Lucille Ball at her prime. She was about the funniest person on earth. To this day, I remember a scene from an iconic episode of I Love Lucy in which Lucy and her best friend, Ethel Mertz, get a job at a candy factory, working on an assembly line, boxing chocolates. At first they keep up with the pace of the assembly line, but as it goes faster and faster and faster, mayhem breaks out. Lucy and Ethel resort to all sorts of crazy antics—storing the chocolates in their mouths, hats, even shirts—to cope with the deluge of candy, until the whole thing collapses in a bout of hysterics.

Whenever I think about modern inbound marketing processes, I always find myself thinking about that scene from I Love Lucy. It’s pretty obvious why: When you first start publishing powerful content online, engaging with buyers on social media, and using SEO and SEM to attract interest, the results can be gratifying. New leads start streaming through the door in an almost assembly line progression. The assembly line starts moving faster and faster and faster as you improve in search optimization and invest more in your marketing programs. Sooner or later, mayhem breaks out. But it’s really not very funny. You end up throwing valuable leads on the floor.

So the first reason we need technology is due to the scale of the challenge. In a business of any size, especially one with ...