11 Ways to Accelerate Revenue Growth
Big, fat, juicy revenue. As a marketer, it’s what you want. And even more than that, you aim for ways to ACCELERATE your revenue growth. The faster you can generate revenue, the better position you’ll be in to build your brand, capitalize on new opportunities and achieve the ultimate vision you have for your business (plus have bigger, bolder, crazier company parties, if that’s your thing…).
With all of this said, though, markets are hyper-competitive and potential buyers are always looking for the best deal. What’s a marketer to do?
There are actually quite a number of ways you can restructure your offerings without reinventing the wheel. Here are 11 highly effective methods to not only bring in more revenue, but also accelerate the pace of revenue growth for your business.
1. Introduce a Recurring Revenue Model
If you sell one-offs or your pricing model is project-based, look to restructure your offerings to add value over time. An excellent way to do this is with a recurring revenue model. This could take the shape of a monthly retainer, subscription, membership, etc. Fitness gyms are a good example of this approach.
2. Productize Your Services
If you sell a service, explore ways to package your services into “products.” This can be the productization of your process, the introduction of tangible deliveries, or the combination of multiple services in a structured package. For example, if your company offers business plan consulting, you could offer business plan software, “Business Plan VIP” with a quarterly analysis and report included, or a “Business Plan in a Box.”
3. Develop a Blue Ocean Strategy
Explore the white space in your market. In their book Blue Ocean Strategy, authors Renée Mauborgne and W. Chan Kim point to Cirque du Soleil as an example of an organization that created uncontested market space and made the competition irrelevant. What they did was change the playing field. They launched not as a commoditized “circus,” but instead as the amalgamation of something totally new. Brainstorm a new paradigm to solve your clients’ problems, and destroy the standard cost-value paradigm!
4. Bundle
Even though Harvard Business Review produces many individual pieces of content, they are continually rolling out new bundles of related content focused on different areas of management. In other words, you can purchase marketing bundles, HR bundles or leadership bundles, etc. Think of ways that you can bundle your different services into more comprehensive solutions for your clients.
5. Go “Premium”
If you are building a Camry today, you have the foundation to build a Lexus tomorrow. But like Toyota, don’t just charge 10% more for the Lexus, charge twice as much. Of course you need to back up Lexus level pricing with Lexus level quality and you’ll need to thrill the heck out of your customers, but assuming you can do that, it’s a strategy that enables you to be more profitable with fewer customers.
6. Increase Your Rates
Many companies worry that if they raise their prices, customers will flee. That’s typically not the case, and in fact, higher prices can often lead to actually more sales. This is because, as social psychologist and New York Times bestselling author Robert B. Cialdini explains, for markets in which it’s difficult for people to assess quality, they substitute price as the determining factor of quality. In other words, folks will see your higher prices and automatically assume you provide higher quality.
7. Develop Products & Services for Different Audience Segments
Fuhu has ranked #1 as the fastest growing business in the U.S. for the past two years, according to the Inc. 500. A major boost to their revenue has been the introduction of many variations of the same product. For example, their main product, the Nabi tablet, comes as the Nabi Jr. for ages 4+, the Nabi 2 for ages 6+, the Nabi XD for ages 13+. They also have a Disney version, Nickelodeon version and Dreamtab version. You get the picture…
8. Remove Friction
Prior to Salesforce, if an enterprise wanted to install a CRM application, it would involve many months of configuration and then ongoing, expensive professional services. Think of how Salesforce turned the CRM world on its head by removing the massive amounts of friction in enterprise CRM solutions. With Salesforce, any business could sign up with a credit card and get going in minutes for a set monthly fee. Salesforce is now a $4 billion company – removing friction in the process works!
9. Provide an Escalation Path
Providing an escalation path for growth is a method for allowing your client to start small and to grow into a larger client as trust builds or as they grow their business over time. For example, if a company is not ready to purchase your full package of payroll services, offer an audit upfront. Then offer baseline payroll management. Then offer tax administration, custom reporting, compliance monitoring, and ultimately employee benefits management.
10. Institute a Certification Program
An effective means of increasing retention and revenue is to establish a certification program. This is highly common among software developers such as Microsoft and Adobe, but can also be used by service providers looking to expand their reach through a network of professionals implementing their methods. An added benefit of this approach is the credibility and validation that it inherently holds in the eyes of the target audience.
11. Do More for Existing Customers
An often overlooked area of revenue generation is to brainstorm how you can be helping your existing clients even more. What are their biggest problems? How can you help them breakthrough and solve them? How can you help them achieve more of their goals? Think big and make your clients say “Wow!”. You may need to bring in outside experts in specialized areas or even partner with another company, but all the better, as this will make your offering even harder to match.