Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Whitepaper from TBK Consult

Author Hans Peter Bech, M.Sc. (econ) TBK-WIPA-026


Š Hans Peter Bech, 2016 Unless otherwise indicated, Hans Peter Bech holds the copyrights to all materials on these pages. All rights reserved. No part of these pages, either text or image may be used for any purpose other than personal use. Therefore, reproduction, modification, storage in a retrieval system or retransmission, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, for reasons other than personal use, is strictly prohibited without prior written permission. Published by TBK PublishingŽ (a division of TBK Consult Holding ApS) Strandvejen 724 2930 Klampenborg Denmark CVR: DK31935741 www.tbkpublishing.com ISBN: 978-87-93116-20-7 TBK-WIPA-026


Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Table of contents: Target audience

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Abstract Author

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Acknowledgements

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Introduction

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The S-Curve

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A Revenue Generation Model

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A very long revenue generation process

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A very short revenue generation process

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The Four Basic Challenges

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Challenge 1: Invisibility

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Challenge 2: The Product is not the Solution

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Challenge 3: Value is Situational

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Challenge 4: Crossing the Chasm

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The 6 Trends That Can Help Us or Kill Us

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The Business Model Environment

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The Trends

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The Market (the Demand Side of the Market)

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The Industry (the Supply Side of the Market)

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The Economy

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The Generic Trends

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Trend #1: Software is eating the world

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Trend #2: We need to move faster and faster

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

The industry trends on the supply side of the market. Trend #3: Prices will fall

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Trend #4: Customer Acquisition Cost will increase

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The market trends – the demand side of the market

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Trend #5: Customers become more educated

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Trend #6: Propaganda is dead

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The Six Steps to Success

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Step #1: Ambition, Teamwork and Leadership

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Step #2: Use the Business Model Framework

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Step #3: Choose Your Channels Carefully

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Step #4: Marketing and Sales Are Genuine Business Processes

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Step #5: Content Marketing

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Step #6: We Must Use Analytics in Optimizing our Revenue Generating Activities

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Recommended Literature

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About the author

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Targeted audience

The target audience for this whitepaper is the board of directors, the CEO and the sales and marketing executives and managers of information technology companies with ambitions for achieving global market leadership.

Abstract

The whitepaper is explaining why the burning ambition for global market leadership is necessary for long term survival in the information technology industry. The time available to get to the leadership positions is becoming steadily shorter and shorter and the positions are only available to the executives that passionately strive for leadership and can muster the resources to get here. The whitepaper describes the four fundamental challenges that all information technology companies face and the six global trends that need to be internalized in the growth strategy required for achieving global market leadership. Finally, the whitepaper suggests a six step strategy framework that can be applied to unfold the true potential of any information technology company and ensure getting to global market leadership before their value proposition gets obsoleted or their competitors take this position. The whitepaper is based on a series of keynotes and guest lectures that the author delivered in the spring of 2016 at the Software Industry Conference in The Netherlands and at the ITĂœ Teknopark and Sabanci University School of Management in Istanbul, Turkey.

Author

Hans Peter Bech, M.Ss. (econ.)

Acknowledgements

Design and lay-out: Sordako OĂœ, Tallinn, Estonia, info@kompot.ee

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Proof reading: Emma Crabtree, ecr@tbkconsult.com

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Introduction

I was in the US a couple of months ago and on a dull Wednesday morning I went to a local shopping mall where there is an Apple store. Entering the crowded shop, I was met by an Apple employee telling me that there was a 45-minute waiting time for the next available sales person. Did I want to hang around in the shop or would I come back later? The rep got my Apple ID and I went for a cappuccino at the Starbucks around the corner, returned 45 minutes later and was immediately taken care of. I bought a couple of iPads and some accessories and I was out of the shop in less than 15 minutes. This example epitomizes what this whitepaper is about. We have this: An awesome product. But we want is this: A booming business where people beat a path to our door and line up for 45 minutes to buy our products and services. What is in this apparently magic box that can turn an awesome product into a booming business?

The S-Curve

Let me emphasize that it has nothing to do with magic nor wizardry. It is actually just the good old S-curve (see Figure 1 below) – market share up the Y-axis and time out the X-axis. We start a company based on a great idea. Some of us (around 10%) manage to find a product/market match, move out of the startup stage and become a real company making a profit.

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So now what?

Now we want to scale along the green curve and grow our company to market leadership. But only very few of us will find the way to market leadership. Like most we will drop off to the red curve. We will remain profitable and we will grow, but not as fast as the market and not as fast as our competitors. After some years our competitors have taken those leadership positions and we slide along the red curve and the value of the company we created shrinks and shrinks. Being number 3, 4, 5Â or 6 in a market means that we are either coming along the green curve from below or we are on the red curve. In the long run there are no attractive middle positions available.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Market Leaders

Why?

Make or Break

Startup

The Rest

Figure : The S-curve and the two growths options Because it is an intrinsic characteristic of the information technology industry that the winners take it all. That’s obvious in markets with networking effects such as Skype, WhatsApp, Google, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. But also where there are limited networking effects do the winners enjoy massive advantages. Examples are Apple, SAP, Oracle, Microsoft, Basecamp, Atlassian, Epic, Sitecore and Salesforce.com. So the objective of an information technology company is not only to grow and become profitable.

The objective is to make it to global market leadership as fast as possible because that is the only reasonably comfortable position in the software industry. The example I gave with Apple is not really relevant anymore. Apple was founded on April 1st 1976 which is 40 years ago. Today and in this industry we don’t have 40 years anymore to make it to market leadership.

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This whitepaper is about the companies in the “make or break” space and how they can ensure staying on the green curve as opposed to sliding down the red one and losing all the value they worked so hard to create.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

This is a generic revenue generation model. Let me take you through the model in chronological order.

A Revenue Generation Model

Figure : A generic revenue generation model Over in the north western corner we decide what we want to do and who we want do it for. SVM stands for Strategic Value Management. Our products, services and domain insight are the basis for our customer value proposition and we define the ideal customer profile for this particular value proposition – the ideal customers are those customers that get the most value out of what we have to offer AND that we are able to identify with standard demographic data. When we have this product/market fit in place and have proven that we have something which our ideal customers really want and that is perceived as better than the competitive alternatives that they know of, then we have the launch pad for developing a systematic revenue generation process which should become repeatable, replicable and thereby scalable. WHEN WE ARE OUT OF THE STARTUP STAGE THE REVENUE GENERATION PROCESS ALWAYS HAS 5 MAJOR PARTS:

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A marketing process part, where we build awareness and generate leads. People cannot buy from us if they cannot find us or if we cannot find them. Not all customers are in the market for what we offer all the time, so we will have to nurture the relationships until they move into the next stage -> sales In the sales process we deal individually with potential customers that are now actively in the market for what we offer and where we essentially facilitate and influence their purchase process. The next stage is the delivery/implementation process where we deliver the value we promised. The fourth is customer retention (keeping the customer). And the fifth part is the growth process (where we up and cross sell) with the objective of bringing more value to our clients and adding them to our growing list of satisfied references.


Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Let me give you a couple of examples:

A very long revenue generation process

In eastern Denmark (the isles of Zealand and Bornholm) we are in the middle of implementing a new Electronic Medical Record system, or IT healthcare platform as we call it, to serve 40,000 IT users at 17 hospitals and 54 other healthcare institutions serving 2,5 million citizens. This €135M+ project went to US-vendor Epic. The official procurement phase started with pre-qualification in September 2012. Five vendors were long-listed in November the same year. Three vendors were shortlisted in April 2013 and the final vendor selection was made in January 2014, training and preparation was done in 2014 and 2015 and the first units will go live in May this year and the project rollout will be completed by the end of 2017. Epic started establishing communication lines to the Danish authorities years before the tender process started. My research1 indicates growing interactions with Epic and Epic customers from 2007. Let’s just say that the marketing phase took 5 years, the sales phase 2 years and the implementation phase 4 years which is a total of 11 years. Talking to some of the vendors participating in this tender I have estimated that the direct cost of sales was €1-2M. That means losing this project had a direct cost of €1-2M. But the real cost is the opportunity cost = the business that these resources could have generated for the company elsewhere. The fundamental design criteria for a scalable revenue generation model in this situation is the ability to say “no thank you” very early in the process. Prospect qualification becomes a critical competence plus an implementation approach ensuring delivery according to specifications, time and budget.

A very short revenue generation process

At the opposite end of the spectrum we have Classloom, which is a webbased collaboration platform for teachers, students and parents using a freemium based business model. New users may find the platform, read/watch the content on the web site and sign up for the service within 15 minutes. There still is a marketing phase enabling enough potential users to find the platform.

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Although the average signup time is only 15 minutes there still is a sales development phase making enough information available on the web site for visitors to stay and understand the value proposition so they will sign up for the service and later there is a sales phase of converting users to paying customers and a retention phase keeping them on the platform.

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Publicly available sources on the Internet


Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

So while the revenue generation process (for the average customer) may take several years for some value propositions, and days or even just minutes for other value propositions, it is always a step-by-step process with well-defined sub-processes. Each company has its own specific revenue generation model, and they all serve the purpose of: a steadily increasing number of happy customers with steadily decreasing Customer Acquisition Cost. To be successful in the information technology industry we need to master what I call marketing and sales process engineering. We must recognize that revenue generation is a series of regular business processes that must be designed, tested and optimized. If we believe that revenue generation is some kind of magic that we need wizards to perform then it will never scale. So how do we design your revenue generation model so that it can be operated by normal people and produce more revenue at steadily decreasing customer acquisition cost? That’s the question this whitepaper will answer, but first I need to introduce you to some generic challenges that we face in the information technology industry.

The Four Basic Challenges

In the information technology industry, we are faced with four basic challenges:

Challenge 1: Invisibility This is my watch. It is an Omega Seamaster. (I’ve got one and James Bond also has one.) Visit Omega’s homepage and see what it takes to explain what a Seamaster is and does. It doesn’t take much. One page is enough. What you see is what you get. This is an Apple Watch.

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Visit the Apple web site and see for yourself what it takes to communicate what the Apple Watch is. Certainly not an easy task. It’s competing for the same “real estate” on our body, namely the wrist. But it is 1% watch and 99% something else. It is highly customizable and people buy it for many different reasons.

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Takeaway: information technology products are practically invisible and that makes it very difficult for customers to relate their problems and needs to our products. Especially if we are an unknown brand. Especially when we are not among the market leaders.

Challenge 2: The Product is not the Solution

In the information technology industry there is often a huge difference between the product and the solution. Example: We have CAD software and the customer wants to build a bridge.

Takeaway: In the information technology industry the product is seldom the solution and that makes it very difficult for customers to relate their problems and needs to our products. Especially if we are an unknown brand. Especially when we are not among the market leaders.

Challenge 3: Value is Situational

Even when we have the most super cool disc jockey in town and he plays the same kind of music every night the party is never the same two nights in a row. It’s the interaction between the DJ and the crowd that makes the party. It is exactly the same in the information technology industry. Without the customer’s active participation, the solution will not work and deliver the expected value.

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A good example is CRM systems. For some companies the CRM system is a major contributor to their journey towards global market leadership. For other companies it has no impact or maybe even a negative impact. The technology is exactly the same, but the customers’ ability to organize around the technology is very different.

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Takeaway: The value of information technology products is very situational and that makes it very difficult for customers to relate their problems and needs to our products. Especially if we are an unknown brand. Especially when we are not among the market leaders.

Challenge 4: Crossing the Chasm

Are you familiar with the law of diffusion of innovation? Are you familiar with the principles behind this illustration?

20%

Figure : The law of diffusion of innovation What is the name2 for the 20%? If we are an information technology company then we must be familiar with the law of diffusion of innovation that was introduced by Professor Rodgers in 1962, but made widely known by Geoffrey Moore in his book Crossing the Chasm, which came out first in 1991 and in a new edition3 two years ago.

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Have you ever noticed that there are basically two types of reactions you get if you tell other people that you have something new? If you introduce something new and exciting to another person you will get one of two reactions:

A:

That sounds interesting, please tell me more!

B:

Really? Who is using that?

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2

The tipping point!

3

Including the impact of the Internet


Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

According to Rodgers and Moore the market is divided into two main segments:

࿼࿼ The Early Market consisting of people genuinely interested in anything new. ࿼࿼ The Mainstream Market consisting of people genuinely uninterested in anything new.

The challenges are:

࿼࿼ If we are a new player with a new product, then only the early market types are prepared to actively engage with us. They will not all buy from us, but some of them may. ࿼࿼ The main stream market (the majority!) will not engage with us. They are deliberately staying away from anything new and from any company that is not well established and not among the market leaders.

What’s the problem?

#1

Early market types are hard to find

#2

And winning Early market customers is not enough to take us to the tipping point.

The tipping point is around 20% market share. This is where market dynamics change, demand becomes pull driven and our biggest challenge with revenue generation is not marketing and sales, but scaling our delivery capacity. Passing the tipping point gets us into the tornado where the ratio between CLV4 and CAC5 becomes 3 or higher. When products are invisible and the value situational then mainstream customers prefer tested solutions from the recognized market leaders. If we want to stay on the green curve we must find ways to sell to mainstream customers, before they are ready to deal with us. We have to find ways to “fake it” until we can make it. These are the four fundamental challenges that we have to manage if we are an upcoming information technology company. But the challenges do not end here. There is more to come.

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4

Customer Life-time Value

5

Customer Acquisition Cost


Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

This is the business model framework The 6 Trends Osterwalder and Yves Pigneur in 2010. That Can Help Us or Kill Us Key Activities

introduced by Alexander

Value Proposition

Customer Relationship

Customers

Key Partners

Costs

Key Resources

Revenue Channels

Figure : The Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder Any company can be described using this framework consisting of 9 building blocks. It is important to note that the business model is under our full control:

࿼࿼ we define and design our own value propositions; ࿼࿼ we can choose those target market segments that are the best match for this value proposition, ࿼࿼ we choose our channels and ࿼࿼ we choose which relationships we want to build and maintain with our customers. Eventually this part of the business model, which is called the front office is supposed to produce revenue. To operate the front office, we need a back office.

࿼࿼ We need certain types of resources

࿼࿼ Exercising certain types of activities to make the front office work

࿼࿼ We may need to engage some external key partners, as we may not do everything ourselves

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࿼࿼ The back office will produce cost All the elements of our business model are within our full control and if we need to improve our business then the business model framework is an excellent platform for such discussions.

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The Business Model Environment

What we do not control is all the white space around the business model. We call this space the business model environment.

Changes in the business model environment may obsolete our business, but they will also present us with exciting new opportunities. Alexander Osterwalder has divided the business model environment into four areas.

The Trends

࿼࿼ Technology ࿼࿼ Regulatory and Politics ࿼࿼ Culture ࿼࿼ Socioeconomic issues

The Market (the Demand Side of the Market) ࿼࿼ Market Issues ࿼࿼ Market Segments ࿼࿼ Needs and Demands ࿼࿼ Switching cost and

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࿼࿼ Revenue Attractiveness

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

The Industry (the Supply Side of the Market) ࿼࿼ Competitors

࿼࿼ New Entrants ࿼࿼ Substitute Products & Services ࿼࿼ Stakeholders ࿼࿼ Suppliers and other supply chain actors

The Economy

࿼࿼ Global Market Conditions ࿼࿼ Capital Market Conditions ࿼࿼ Commodities and other natural resources ࿼࿼ Employment, Inflation, Balance of Payments

In the following I will give you the most important issues – as I see them – across trends, industry and markets. I don’t find the economic trends having any major impact on companies in the Make or Break phase, so I will leave this area out.

The Generic Trends Trend #1: Software is eating the world

%

Technology penetration will continue to increase opening new business opportunities for all of us in all walks of life.

TECHNOLOGY PENETRAION

Time

Software (or information technology) is truly eating the world as Marc Andreassen wrote some years ago in the Wall Street Journal. The forces behind this trend are:

࿼࿼ The proliferation of the internet in terms of penetration and speed ࿼࿼ The falling prices of technology and ࿼࿼ The conversion from on premise to as-a-service formats

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࿼࿼ that makes payments related to consumption rather than acquisition. We move CAPEX to OPEX.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Trend #2: We need to move faster and faster

Time WINDOW OF OPPORTUNITY

Our windows of opportunity will continue to shrink. The barriers of entry will continue to drop opening the market to new entrants. We need to move faster and go for pole positions to improve our chances for survival.

2015

2020

2025

2030

2035

Trend #3: Prices will fall

The industry trends on the supply side of the market. $/€

PRICE PER USER

Prices on information technology will continue to fall. When the first edition of Navision (financial administration software) for MS-DOS came on the market in 1984 the price was €4.300 for a single user product running on a PC that had a price tag of €10.000.

Time

Today the going rate for such software is around €300 or 7% of what it was 30 years ago.

If you buy a Mac, the Apple office software package is included in the price. With Microsoft Office that cost of $99/year for 5 devices comes with 1TB of file space in the cloud.

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Yes, we will all work like crazy to add more value to our products, but we can only hope to minimize the decrease in prices. We cannot change the trend.

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Trend #4: Customer Acquisition Cost will increase

$/â‚Ź

CUSTOMER ACQUISITION COST

Customer Acquisition Cost will increase. It is a consequence of the increased competitive pressure and the saturation of marketing channels, but it is also a consequence of some issues on the market side that I will introduce next.

Time

The market trends – the demand side of the market

Trend #5: Customers become more educated Customers become more educated, experienced and demanding. They will be more difficult to sell to.

Trend #6: Propaganda is dead Propaganda is dead. Customers have a hard time relating their needs to our products and they have stopped believing what we have to say about ourselves and our products. We will have to redesign our communication strategies completely to get our messages to the market and get the attention of our potential customers. These are the six most important trends that I see facing the information technology industry today and in the near future.

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So what are we to do about it? What are the routes we can choose to take advantage of these trends and use them to our benefit rather than letting them kill us?

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The Six Steps to Success

Let me give you my six step recipe for success.

Step #1: Ambition, Teamwork and Leadership I meet with information technology companies around the world and I must conclude that only a minority have the burning ambition to become market leaders. They would all love if it happened to them, but this is not how it works. Because of the law of diffusion of innovation, the market leaders will run over everyone else. In the information technology industry the winner takes all. We must have the ambition of becoming the market leader to enjoy the tornado acceleration advantages. People will not work hard and be dedicated just to make you and me rich. People are not motivated by growing revenue and profit. Our business needs a purpose that people, and especially millennials, will rally behind. If you need some inspiration and ammunition for your leadership role I can recommend Simon Sinek’s book: Start with why. Without burning ambitions for global market leadership we will not achieve global market leadership.

Burning ambition is the fuel that keeps us moving ahead despite all the unforeseen obstacles and setbacks. And purpose is what makes people come to work dedicated and enthusiastically for our cause every day. Leadership is what makes the meaningful for the people we need to help us make the journey. Step #2: Use the Business Model Framework We need to get these posters up on the wall.

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If we have no better method for engineering our business model this should be our framework.

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Let’s get all our stakeholders on the same page and speaking the same language. We have no time for misalignment and misunderstandings. Disagreement is fine, but misalignment due to misunderstanding and differences in vocabulary is a drain on our execution capacity. There is plenty of literature available (a list of literature is included at the end of this whitepaper) and plenty of consultants available that can help you get started. Key Activities

Step #3: Choose Your Channels Carefully

Value Proposition

Customer Relationship

Customers

Key Partners

Costs

Key Resources

Revenue Channels

Most information technology companies at least in the B2B domain will continue to favor the indirect go-to-market approach through independent resellers. The indirect channel can accelerate our growth and consolidate our leadership position, but it takes away control and can also slow us down and add no value whatsoever. If we choose to work with independent channel partners, then keep in mind that we are introducing a 3rd party business model into our own business model.

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We add a potential lever and multiplication opportunity, but we also give away control and we introduce complexity. Promotion: If you are working with or consider working with an indirect channel I can recommend my own book: Building Successful Partner Channels. Promotion ended.

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Step #4: Marketing and Sales Are Genuine Business Processes When it comes to scaling revenue generation this may be the most important step of them all. Accept that marketing and sales are genuine business processes that need to be defined, described, monitored and optimized. Customers just don’t jump right down to the bottom of our funnel and especially mainstream customers are hard to move from top to bottom. Accept that we are facilitating customer buying journeys (people – not companies) and that we may even have different personas with different needs to deal with. We need to support the buyers with different deliverables depending on where they are in their journey and we need to have very different conversations in the individual touch points, too. The biggest mistake you can make is to assign sales people to run the entire funnel. This is what we do in startup mode, and many companies continue this approach, but that will never scale to market leadership. We need to introduce “division of labor” and specialization in the revenue generation process. The division of labor was introduced by Adam Smith is his book “The Wealth of Nations” and it is now time to introduce this proven principle in marketing and sales also. In Inq com uir ing ies

Em Off ail ers

nts

Eve

te bsi ons We trati gis Re

MARKETING

?

IN BOUND

Inbound sales development is responsible for managing and qualifying inbound leads. Inbound leads are mostly unqualified. There are very few genuine fish in the net.

te bsi ns We uctio tr Ins

OUT BOUND

There is a huge inbound movement arising around the world, and while I agree that we must find ways to be found and make the right customers come to us I still believe that many information technology companies need an -> outbound sales development functions also.

?

SALES

FA R M IN G Up-Sell

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Marketing is responsible for generic brand building activities and for nurturing and generating what we can call suspects. They are responsible for making potential customers find us!

Outbound sales development reaches out to our ideal customers with the objective of identifying opportunities for the future. Over time they will build a goldmine of insight into our core market. Inbound and outbound are both sales development functions, and they should not be mixed. They both pass the qualified leads to our quota carrying sales people for closing.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

New customer acquisition sales are the most expensive resources we have and they should be reserved for only the best qualified projects. Existing customers should be managed by farmers. Expecting that single individuals can manage all these roles is naive. Only very, very few people can do so and relying on only very few people doesn’t scale well. “Predictable Revenue” and “From Impossible to Inevitable” are excellent books that can give you more inspiration in this area. Takeaway: Introduce division of labor and specialization in your marketing and sales processes.

Step #5: Content Marketing I have mentioned several times that propaganda is dead. All research confirms that customers have a hard time relating their needs directly to our products and that they do not believe what we say about ourselves and our products.

Then what are the most powerful marketing vehicles? On the very top we have -> Recommendations.

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Figure : Content marketing is required to engage with potential customers when they explore improvement opportunities Most powerful is recommendations from people we know and the least powerful is recommendations from people that we know are paid to make the recommendation, such as celebrities.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

What comes 2nd? Permission based email marketing! Yes, good old e-mail marketing is still a very effective marketing channel.

What comes 3rd? Social media. People reading our posts and our comments to discussions related to their needs, issues and challenges.

#4 is search!! Let me emphasize that the power of the various marketing and sales channels differs quite substantially from industry to industry, but one thing is crystal clear for all companies in the make & break phase:

We cannot afford to pay our way to leads, prospects and customers with advertising! Therefore, we must map how the communication takes place in our market and design our marketing and sales strategies around the channels that our ideal customers prefer and the language that they use.

And the communication strategy that we must apply is what I call Responsive Content Marketing. We must discuss the issues that are of interest to our potential customers and we must do it so well that people recommend our content to their networks and we must engage as soon at our audience respond to our messages. Dan Norris has written a great book on content marketing that I can strongly recommend.

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The recommendation here is to get our Responsive Content Marketing strategy in place and executed.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Step #6: We Must Use Analytics in Optimizing our Revenue Generating Activities. And that leads me to my final recommendation.

Figure : Ambitious information technology companies must apply information technology to their own marketing and sales processes. Marketing and sales processes are increasingly digital or at least digitally documented. Mastering statistics and analytics becomes a critical skill in the continuous optimization effort of the marketing and sales processes. We cannot scale our business without the use of marketing and sales automation software. We cannot measure and optimize our revenue generation activities without applying software to the processes. We cannot optimize our revenue generation activities without taking our own medicine. There are numerous tried and tested platforms available. We must find the platforms that match our needs and requirements and invest the time and effort in making them work and keep them going. When it comes to marketing and sales software there is a big difference between the products and the solution and success requires our 100% commitment and engagement from top management.

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I recommend you read the book Inbound Marketing for additional inspiration in this area.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

-> These are my six recommendations for how to accelerate growth and become market leader in the information technology industry.

1

You must really want to achieve market leadership.

2

And you need a purpose that’s worth working for.

3

Use the Osterwalder Business Model Generation – it will help you save time and stay on the green curve.

4

If you want to work with independent resellers, then read my book.

5

Apply division of labor and specialization in your marketing and sales processes.

6

Communicate using the language of your customers on the channels where your customers are.

7

Take you own medicine – use sales and marketing software.

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Following my recommendations will keep you on the green curve all the way to market leadership.

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Recommended Literature

Neil Rackham: SPIN Selling (May 1988) Michael Bosworth: Solution Selling: Creating Buyers in Difficult Selling Markets (September 1994) Mahan Khalsa and Randy Illig Let's Get Real or Let's Not Play: Transforming the Buyer/Seller Relationship. Expanded edition (October 30, 2008) Keith M. Eades: The New Solution Selling: The Revolutionary Sales Process That is Changing the Way People Sell (December 2003) Stephen J. Bistritz and Nicholas A.C. Read: Selling to the C-Suite: What Every Executive Wants You to Know About Successfully Selling to the Top (September 2009) Matthew Dixon and Brent Adamson: The Challenger Sale: Taking Control of the Customer Conversation (October 2012) Alexander Osterwalder & Yves Pigneur: A Handbook for Visionaries, Game Changers, and Challengers (July 2010) Aaron Ross & Marylou Tyler: Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce. com (July 2011) Eric Ries: The Lean Startup: How Constant Innovation Creates Radically Successful Businesses (October 2011) Simon Sinek: Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action (December 2011) Jill Konrath: Selling to Big Companies (June 2012) Larry Keely et al.: Ten Types of Innovation: The Discipline of Building Breakthroughs (April 2013) Geoffrey Moore: Crossing the Chasm: Marketing and Selling Disruptive Products to Mainstream Customers (3rd edition January 28, 2014)

www.tbkconsult.com

Steve Blank and Bob Dorf: The Startup Owner's Manual: The Step-byStep Guide for Building a Great Company (January 2014) Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah: Inbound Marketing, Revised and Updated: Attract, Engage, and Delight Customers Online (August 2014)

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

Mark Roberge: The Sales Acceleration Formula: Using Data, Technology, and Inbound Selling to go from $0 to $100 Million (February 2015) Hans Peter Bech: Building Successful Partner Channels (April 2015) David Meerman Scott: The New Rules of Marketing and PR, 4th Edition (September 2015) Gabriel Weinberg and Justin Mares: Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth (October 2015)

www.tbkconsult.com

Trish Bertuzzi: The Sales Development Playbook (January 2016)

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Designing Scalable Revenue Generation Models

About the author

Hans Peter Bech Hans Peter Bech is an Amazon bestselling author. He is a frequent blogger on issues related to growing information technology companies to global market leadership and has written several books and numerous whitepapers on business development in the IT industry. Hans Peter also facilitates workshops for the TBK AcademyÂŽ and is an advisor for governments and companies. He holds a M.Sc. in macroeconomics and political science from the University of Copenhagen.

More about Hans Peter Bech

www.tbkconsult.com

Other publications by the author

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TBK-WIPA-026


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