In recent years, there’s been a move within companies to consolidate the teams that drive revenue. It makes sense on the surface — get them all on the same page, working together, and revenue should improve, right?
But there’s a problem.
The focus of this effort is usually on uniting Marketing and Sales. Marketing still has to perform their top-of-funnel activities, but their priority is to drive leads for Sales, making them an ipso facto sales development team.
I could talk for an hour about why I think this is a bad idea, but that’s not the point of today’s newsletter.
Instead, I’m offering a better solution.
To be clear, I’m not arguing with a centralized Revenue team. Revenue is why a business exists, so by all means, let’s prioritize it.
But instead of focusing on departments (Marketing vs. Sales), I believe it’s a better idea to focus on the customer journey. Or more to the point, the levers along that journey that drive revenue.
For any company with a recurring revenue component, there are four levers that impact revenue:
- Sales
- Renewed subscriptions
- Upgrades and add-ons
- Referrals
Notice that three of those levers exist below the funnel, or after the sale. Which means 75% of your revenue can be impacted by shifting your focus from the top of the funnel to below the funnel.
It sounds crazy, I know, but it works.
By optimizing below-funnel revenue levers, your customer lifetime value goes through the roof, sales become easier, and you actually need less marketing to drive growth.
The seeds of this strategy began when I led growth for an early stage SaaS company a few years ago. But it came into sharp focus when I began working with a successful SaaS company that does little to no top-of-funnel marketing.
Together, we developed a below-funnel content strategy that doubled the revenue from existing customers and cut sales meetings to win a new deal in half.
Here’s what I learned:
Making everything about sales won’t drive growth. Plugging the leaks below the funnel — especially poor adoption and churn — before adding new customers will.
But to do that, you need to adopt a revenue-first, bottom-up strategy that gains and retains customers..
After the results I’ve seen, this is my number-one recommendation for any recurring revenue company. If you want to learn more, I’m happy to look at how it could help your organization.
In the meantime, you can read my case study to get more details about this radical approach to growth.
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