How to Increase Revenue Quickly

How To Increase Revenue Quickly

This is is part of my live-learning series! I will be updating this post as I continue through my journey. I apologize for any grammatical errors or incoherent thoughts. This is a practice to help me share things that are valuable without falling apart from the pressure of perfection. 

When you’re working in a company, cash and sales are your lifeblood. You will always be encouraged to grow sales and revenue. Sometimes, you will need to do that on a short timeline to hit quotas, reach break-even, hit profitability, or in the worst case, just survive.

In this post, I explore how to increase revenue quickly so you can upsell, close sales, and keep growing on a short timeline.

Before I do, I’d like to ask:

Why are you on a short sales timeline?

There can be many reasons that you have an accelerated timeline to achieve sales and revenue growth. 

Maybe, one of your key customers responsible for a large portion of revenue has churned. Maybe, you’ve accepted investment and are expected to accelerate top-line annual recurring revenue significantly to move towards desired returns and another round at a higher valuation. You could be a sales representative entering an organization and showing you can make an impact.

Consequences of short sales timelines

This is interesting to think about. Depending on your relationship with current customers, the pressure to upsell and extract revenue could be premature, leading to a strained relationship. 

If you are reaching out to net-new prospects, then you may be trying to accelerate a natural sales cycle and jeopardize a good relationship.

Alternatively, viewed positively, accelerating sales timelines can qualify leads quickly and weed out people who won’t convert to customers. It will help you identify pain points and value propositions that trigger revenue-generating actions so your sales process can continue to tighten and drive positive outcomes in a shortened timeline.

Macrotrends in sales

These are a few trends that I’ve noticed in personal experience and through research that are having an impact on sales and accelerating your sales cycles for increased revenue.

People aren’t answering phones

In the past, getting the number of a potential customer and giving them a call was a viable way to increase sales. Sure, it was a numbers game, it was hard, and it takes talented people to execute sales effectively, it was a proven method.

Today, people don’t answer their phones. It could be that they are working from home, it could be that they see an unknown number that is most likely spam (which you basically are), or they will let you leave a voicemail and possibly call back if that message sounds compelling enough. I will say – I hate when someone leaves a voicemail and I have to go through the archaic process to listen back to it – there is already friction created there that is not positive.

LinkedIn has limited connection requests

In 2021, LinkedIn cracked down on the number of connection requests someone can send in a week. I believe today for most, it hovers around 100. 

The days of sending out 1,000 connection requests a week are gone meaning that LinkedIn as a viable channel to do mass outreach to play that numbers game and accelerate sales is gone. 

To now be effective on LinkedIn, you need to be precise and targeted. Even then, you may not reach the number threshold to achieve the outcomes you are looking for. 

Community sells

We are seeing the success of community-driven companies like Hugging Face, Notion, Dovetail and more who are catalyzing sales through the building of deliberate communities filled with prospective customers.

These Twitter, Slack, and forum communities create self-driving social proof, credibility and sales acceleration. Without community, companies will have a difficult time accelerating sales. 

What good paths do I have?

In situations like this, it is easy to get a bit overwhelmed and panicked. Your timeline is condensed and you have so many potential options for actions to take. You must prioritize your time radically and make the right choices to maximize the impact of each moment. To do that, you should assess what options you have, what is most viable, and what will achieve the outcome you are looking for. 

Identify your highest-performing channel

When times are condensed, it is worthwhile to double down on working channels instead of trying to identify entirely new ones. 

In some cases, this is viable and sometimes it is not. For example, if organic search is a high-converting sales channel for you, there may be some options to improve your site performance to drive more leads and sales. However, if you are creating net-new content you hope converts to sales, those pages may take several months to rank and drive those outcomes. If your timeline is shorter than three to six months, an organic search may not be the best channel.

Leverage your current network

The hope is that through your journey you have connected with supporters and prospective customers. When sales cycles are compressed, you need to rely on these groups to help you accelerate revenue growth. 

Whether you ask for referrals, make a proposition, renew a conversation that wasn’t ready to move forward at the time, this option should have less friction than completely new prospects who don’t know who you are. 

Upsell to your current customer base

If you have a customer base already, congratulations. These customers who are already paying you and (hopefully) are seeing value in your offering may be the most viable path to you increasing revenue in a short timeline.

Identify your valuable customers who have a history of paying good enough deal sizes to achieve your goals and reach out to them with high-value offers, new updates they can take advantage of, and your desire to deepen the relationship. 

Hopefully (hope is not a plan), your customers are seeing growth in their own operations, can contribute at least some of that to you, and are happy to invest more into your relationship. If they can’t, don’t over-exert pressure on them – that can jeopardize the relationship. Instead, ask if they know anyone else who could benefit from your offerings or at the very least see if you can get a strong testimonial you can use in sales campaigns moving forward. 

Resources

https://blog.hubspot.com/sales/speed-up-sales-cycle

https://www.briantracy.com/blog/sales-success/proven-strategies-to-increase-sales-of-your-product/

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