Introduction

Small-businesses owners have a particular challenge that Final Sigma has been built to address: How to I reconstruct my organization and systems to support growth?

As a small team, each member wheres several different hats. As a one-, two-, three, or twenty-man show, everything can be taken care of because everyone’s happy to where whichever hat the moment calls for.

However, as the business continues to grow - both in its internal complexity and in the external demands placed upon it - hats will need to be distributed. It seems that hats are oftentimes retained (and not distributed) when there isn’t clear definition on where one hat ends and the next begins.

To solve this problem insofar as it relates to building and scaling the sales and marketing component of a business, Final Sigma thinks of these hats through the lens of the 4-Cylinder Revenue Engine.

The Four Cylinders

Each of these “cylinders” represents a particular discipline or function that contributes to growth and retention to your businesses’s streams of revenue. The solopreneur wears all of these hats. A small team might see a core sales representative splitting his time between two of them while other team members wear the other two on a part-time basis. However the hats are distributed, all of theme need to be identified, optimized, and codified to ensure the work done this quarter contribute to the revenue earned next quarter.

#1: Lead Generation

Traditionally called “marketing,” the Lead Generation team is responsible for producing one key deliverable: quality leads.

Their focus is very broad, thinking in terms of verticals, categories, and geographies. Their reach includes thousands of potential buyers (if not millions). Work in this cylinder begins with deep thought in how to send the message out into the marketplace and ends with clear strategies to bring interested parties back into the businesses to initiate the relationship that will be carried by the next cylinders.

#2: Business Development

In this context, Business Development doesn’t simply refer to someone responsible for cold calling for forty hours per week. Instead, Business Development refers to the process of determining if an interested party will make a good customer. While Lead Generation filters prospects in, Business Development in many ways filters prospects out.

This team has one output that counts: meetings scheduled on Revenue Acquisition’s calendar(s).

Of course, to achieve that deliverable, they will likely do quite a bit of cold calling/emailing on their own. Yet, it’s the next cylinder that begins perhaps the most important step of the journey.

#3: Revenue Acquisition

This cylinder is traditionally called “sales.” These are the people responsible for helping a prospective customer decide if this product or service is the right fit for them and their business. They specialize in acquiring information, developing rich relationships within the prospective client’s company for the purpose of helping them determine if this is the right move to make at this time.

The sales professionals who fill this role are not here to be experts in persuasion. They are the experts in business, looking under nooks and crannies, having difficult conversations, unearthing information and perspectives that potential buyers didn’t even know they had to realize that moving forward is or isn’t a great decision for their business.

This team has one primary output: signed contracts with new customers. And every time a signature rolls in, they introduce the new customer to the final cylinder.

#4: Customer Success

While the other disciplines have a clear beginning and ending to their part of the client journey, Customer Success provides a recurring, year-over-year experience focused on client- or revenue-retention instead of revenue-acquisition.

If the Revenue Acquisition team’s job is to determine if the prospective client will be happy, the Customer Success team’s job is to make sure the client is happy. They specialize in coming alongside the customer and looking at their own services from the customer’s perspective. This team exists to help the customer derive as much value (i.e. make as much money) from the services they bought as possible.

This team will have two types of outputs, contributing to the business’s revenue:

  1. Retained customers, renewing services year-after-year.
  2. Expansions and upgrades, identifying when a customer really needs to add new or expanding existing agreements to derive the value they’re aiming for.

For the latter, it’s possible they may bring back the Revenue Acquisition team, to run mini sales cycles per new agreement to ensure the decision-quality behind signature number two is at least as good as what led to signature number one.

Order of Operations

Though the client experiences a flow from the beginning to the end (Lead Generation -> Business Development -> Revenue Acquisition -> Customer Success), this isn’t the most strategic route to build out a small business’s sales organization, especially when the owner himself is working all of these functions.

1st Step: Codify Sales

The signed contract constitutes the pinnacle of the sales mountain. Therefore, codifying and perfecting the sales cycle of the Revenue Acquisition cylinder is the first area to focus on. Many businesses hire someone to serve as their sales representative as this cylinder comes online.

2nd Step: Amplify Retention

A business often already has a host of clients. Also, this is the experience that new clients will be sent into. Usually working on this cylinder means reorganizing existing client-support systems to enable a Customer Success experience for current customers.

3rd Step: Increase Outreach

Before this process began, the business likely has some level of marketing happening already (Where do you think the existing base of clients came from?). However, now that the sales and client experiences have been organized, it’s time build up the Lead Generation team to alert the masses about your offerings, drawing more people into them. Some businesses will do this with internal resources while others will leverage third-party services.

4th Step: Consolidate Calling

For a long, long time the Revenue Acquisition team members can wear the Business Development this hat. It’s 100% okay to allow your account executives to do their own cold calling and their own lead filtering. However, as the team grows and as sales representatives hone their skills in running the sales cycle, it eventually makes sense to consolidate the cold outreach and lead filtering to its own discipline instead of multiplying the personnel (and expense) under the Revenue Acquisition umbrella.

Moving Forward

This has been a broad-strokes presentation of the approach behind Final Sigma’s Revenue Engineering. On the next pages, we’ll dive more deeply into each discipline, discussing in more detail the rules they follow, the inputs they need, and what a quality deliverable looks like from each team.