The Ultimate Guide to Revenue Marketing

Chances are that you stumbled upon this guide while searching what is “Revenue marketing” and you had no idea what the fuss is all about.

The term revenue marketing is trending in the B2B sector. What seems like another buzzword has real implications when it comes to marketing.

Understanding what lies beneath this umbrella term has tremendous benefits.

Marketing has always been about outcomes and revenue. But as the business moves forward, it gets complicated. And the team cannot tie their strategies to revenues.

Revenue marketing involves making a major shift in the team’s focus and prioritize goal-oriented marketing tasks. It goes way beyond traditional lead generation and personalized marketing.

What is Revenue Marketing? 

Revenue Marketing is the combination of strategies, tactics, and technologies to obtain the following results:

• Drop sales-ready prospects in the top of the funnel
• Accelerate sales opportunities
• Measure marketing progress based on repeatable, predictable, and scalable contribution to your revenue
• Improve ROI of the overall marketing process.

Revenue marketing goes beyond the traditional methods and lays down a clear path to achieve revenue. The traditional marketing method focuses on the process, revenue marketing focuses on the results. Revenue marketers work as an economic engine of the organization. 

Why Revenue Marketing is Important?

Operating sales and marketing separately worked well in the classic days of marketing. The marketing team used to hand over the warm leads to the sales team and the sales team would convert them. 

With the Inbound approach, B2B marketing strategies have become immensely personalized. So today, the marketing and sales teams need to support the customer in a holistic approach throughout entire sales cycle.

This means that both sales and marketing teams should know what goes on in the sales funnel. Together they create a marketing strategy that is focused on driving revenue.

Benefits of Revenue Marketing

Here are three key benefits of revenue marketing:

• The sales team has a better context of the leads, their pain points, and their buying cycle. This information will be crucial in closing the leads.
• Marketing team learns which campaigns, channels, and strategies deliver revenue and not just clicks and views.  
• Customer gets the most relevant information based on their sales cycle and speeds up their decision-making process. 

These benefits highlight how the collaboration of the sales and marketing team is important. Yet many B2B businesses resist this collaboration.

Stage of Revenue Marketing

Here are the 4 stages of the Revenue marketing journey

• Traditional Marketing
• Lead Generation
• Demand Generation
• Revenue Marketing

Revenue marketing is not something different from traditional marketing strategies, it just takes it one step ahead. You must’ve heard about the first three stages, they are pretty common.

Traditional Marketing

Your team is still in the initial stages of the process, the budget is scarce and there are no ways to increase it.

Customer experience depends on what events you are hosting, webinars, or a new product you are launching. There is no clear definition of who your target audience is.

The marketing metrics depend on the number of views, the number of calls received.

What this stage lack is a good lead generation and nurturing strategy. You get a few leads but they cannot be converted since the sales team is not aware of all the customer information.

Lead Generation

At this stage, the company officially sets up a lead generation strategy. But the stage still lacks the glue between the sales and marketing team.

The marketing team thinks the sales team is not working on the leads enough and the sales team thinks the leads lack quality.

There is no clearly defined customer profile and personalization is yet to begin.

The metrics revolve around the number of views, lead generated, email open rate, etc. 

The marketing team does not directly contribute to the bottom line.

The primary challenge here is lead nurturing.

Demand Generation

The demand generation stage requires plenty of planning. Here the marketing team has pre-defined goals with respect to the execution part of the strategy.

The stage faces the following challenges:

• Creating a robust inbound content strategy to generate demand for your business
• To define buyer persona based on buying stage
• To forecast marketing spends, and the revenue generated.

Still, the conflict between the sales and marketing teams exists at this stage.

Revenue Marketing

This stage takes your marketing one step ahead.

Revenue generated by marketing is accurately attributed to the marketing efforts. Marketing automation, inbound content, outbound nurtures, landing pages helps you create predictable, repeatable, and scalable strategies.

Predictable: When your teams exactly knowns what revenue they should expect from the current marketing campaigns.

Repeatable: The process and strategies are documented so that any recent addition to the team can easily replicate the entire process with just basic training.

Scalable: Automation can help you eliminate manual repeatable tasks. Scaling becomes easy when you have a predictable, repeatable process.

4 Steps in Create a Revenue Marketing Strategy

If you are one of those B2B companies who wish to scale their revenue, then revenue marketing is the right strategy for you.

Implementing revenue marketing doesn’t mean you have to start your marketing efforts from scratch. Rather, it offers you an opportunity to view everything from a new perspective. And tie down the strategy to revenue goals.  

The 4 steps of revenue marketing strategy are:

• Building a Buyer Persona
• Align marketing and sales
• Execute revenue focused campaigns
• Analyze and Optimize

Building a Buyer Persona

The first step of revenue marketing strategy is to get a deep understanding of your customer. The marketing campaign you design must be around the pain point you are trying to solve.

You can create a detailed buyer persona to map out the consumer needs at different buying stages.

The buying cycle represents the different steps a prospect needs to take before buying your product or service. It is important to know the buying cycle to line up your sales and marketing efforts 

While the buying cycle may look different for each company, some steps are common in all marketing efforts. In the end, it’s all about knowing the specifics of how your customer prefers buying your product.

Typically, there are 3 stages

1. Awareness: Realizing they have a problem and there is a solution to it
2. Consideration: People considering the best way to solve their problem
3. Decision: Purchasing the product/solution

With excellent knowledge about your customers, you can move forward to the next step

Align Marketing and Sales Team

The reason revenue marketing is so successful because it accomplishes what other marketing strategies could not. It aligns the sales and marketing team to perform as one entity.

Answering the following questions can help you align the sales and marketing team

• Are their Goals Aligned? (with revenue marketing, it’s driving revenue) Are they working towards it?

If not, you need to brainstorm ideas to align the two teams to chase the same goals.

• Are the Marketing and Sales Team aware of their KPIs? Are they aligned with their KPIs?

If not, it’s a great opportunity to sit and help both the teams in defining it. Doing it together may help both the team understand how they impact each other’s performance.

• Are they in agreement with the buyer persona and customer journey? 

If not, bring them on the same page. As this will help them provide a more holistic experience to the customer.

• Does Communication happen easily between both teams?

If not, develop a communication process. Use automation to relay necessary information between both teams. 

Execute Revenue Focused Campaigns

This is the part your marketing team is already comfortable with.

The difference here is this time you arm yourself with additional knowledge of the first two steps. You also take inputs from your sales team and align the campaign to meet your revenue goals.

Aligning with the Sales team helps you create content for all stages of buying cycle. Making it easier for sales reps to close sales.

 Analyze and Optimize

Finally, analyze and measure the result of your marketing strategies. The analysis will tell you what’s working and what’s not.

There are two types of metric you generally track

1. Big Picture Revenue Metrics: Metrics that directly affect the revenue. Like sales, conversion rate, and leads generated.
2. Day-to-day Metrics: Metrics like impressions, click-through rate. To know the daily impact of your marketing campaigns.

Whatever metrics you choose, make sure you align with the sales and marketing team KPI’s that you define in the second step.

The Pitfalls to Avoid   

There are two major reasons why your revenue marketing strategy may not work

1) Lack of Top-down Initiatives – There may be a lack of cohesiveness between the teams. The top management may not be aware of the problems at the bottom line. This makes them create strategies that do not go well with the marketing and sales team.

2) Lack of Collaboration between Marketing and Sales: Since revenue marketing strategies are tied to specific monetary goals, a collaboration of both teams is crucial. Most businesses lack this aspect and see their revenue strategies not working

Six Key Areas of Focus while Developing a Revenue Marketing Strategy

Revenue marketing focuses on a holistic approach to align tech, team, and strategy to give your customer the best possible experience. Since it involves multiple domains, here are the six key areas you need to focus on while developing your revenue marketing strategy.

1) Strategy:

• Align your business with marketing goals
• Organizational Readiness to implement the new strategies
• Operational Readiness
• Inspirational and active leadership
• Sales and Marketing Team Alignment

2) People:

• Relevant Stakeholder alignment
• Resource Planning
• Revenue Marketing Organization
• Good talent acquisition
• Effective Talent management

3) Process Management

• Demand management
• Project management
• Campaign management
• Best practice management
• Accurate Data acquisition

4) Technology

• Technology Management
• Revenue Marketing Architecture
• Planning and selection
• Vendor management
• New Technology Adoption

5) Customer

• Customer data management
• Customer Journey mapping
• Buyer Persona management
• Content Creation
• Content Management

6) Revenue

• Financial Outcome
• Operational Outcome
• Tactical Outcome
• Analyze, Optimize and Report

Making Revenue Marketing Work for You

The goal of revenue marketing is to achieve a predictable, repeatable, and scalable marketing process that delivers sizable outcomes.

Here are a few tips to make revenue marketing for you

1) Document your Revenue Marketing Strategy

Your documented process should guide you on the following:

• Your lead generation process
• What is your campaign creation process?
• How do you manage CRM and automation process?
• How is your sales process defined?
• How do you qualify leads?
• What is the analysis and optimization process?

Your documented strategy needs to be evolving. Experiment constantly and document the new findings. This will help you stay updated with new and optimized strategies. Keep trying new channels, new content strategies, new offers, and try reverse engineer the successful campaigns.

2) Pick the Right Automation Tools

Do not underestimate the power of automation while scaling. A good technological stack will bring your marketing and sales team closer.

Consider the following two points while selecting the right automation tool.

• Data and KPIs – Which tool can summarize your marketing campaign performance? Is the data easily shareable between teams? Does it help you measure KPIs?
• Possible Integrations: Integration is core to automation. The tool you choose must have a good integration scope with the rest of your marketing stack. 

3) Create People Centric Strategies

None of the strategies will work if you do not center it around customers. The primary goal of your business and marketing strategy is to alleviate a customer pain point. The whole point of aligning the sales and marketing team is to give your customer a holistic experience. Keep solving customer problems and revenue will follow.

Conclusion

Most companies even today follow the old marketing structure. Resulting in poor revenue generation. The revenue marketing strategy is specifically focused on generating revenue for an organization. Working in silos won’t cut the cake.

If you want to transform your marketing journey, you got to introduce revenue marketing in the picture. It starts with having the right team in place. But it’s not easy as it sounds. Revenue marketing strategies expect you to re-align your current marketing structure to focus on the outcome and not just the processes.