Market Penetration - Match Customer Type to Revenue Goals
Revenue goals are first identified by customer type. Once customer type is known, revenue goals can be matched to opportunities in the market. For example, a company that is targeting business-to-business revenue goals may look to create solutions that assist enterprise customers with digital transformation initiatives. This will have a massive opportunity for their solutions, since digital transformation and cybersecurity are some of the most pressing issues facing businesses.
Content marketing, establishing thought leadership positions and speaking opportunities can work to establish credibility within the market, which will prove useful in gaining customers and achieving revenue goals. Company websites should be updated with information about new products, services or upcoming events. This is an excellent way to generate leads via email capture and allow visitors to download key information about your company's offerings. Additionally, paid advertising is a great way to reach potential clients and spread the word about products or services. Focusing on a specific type of customer will help keep your budget more tightly managed. For example, if you were focusing on enterprise customers you would use different keywords that non-enterprise customers might use in search queries.
Revenue goals can also be defined by customer needs. Once you have identified a customer's needs, it is much easier to craft solutions that will provide solutions to those needs. For example, an enterprise customer struggling to manage multiple cloud-based platforms might need a solution that can connect existing platforms into one cohesive platform. This kind of solution will appeal to IT departments and bring in a large amount of revenue because they are addressing an internal need of multiple employees that are not the direct decision makers at their company. By matching revenue goals with customer type and their individual needs, you open up more opportunities for revenue.
Market research can provide essential information to crafting a revenue goal and plan. A market research report will include data on industry growth, customer demographics, competitive analysis, as well as what your competitors are doing that is successful. It is important to understand the market in order to attack it properly and create unique solutions that stand out among competition. Market research can also be used for developing a strategic direction for the company. By analyzing the needs of customers you can better tailor your sales messaging and develop a value proposition for both potential customers and employees of your company.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools are used to collect information about potential customers including demographic information, buying trends and actionable leads (i.e., phone number or email address). This information is essential for growing your customer base. You can also keep track of potential customers as they progress through the sales funnel. This gives you an idea of what types of messaging and offers are converting into actual sales, allowing you to refine your approach over time. The challenge with using CRM tools is that, once collected, you have to find a way to make sense of it all and put it into actionable form.
As with any company looking to take the next step in growth, developing a solid revenue goal and plan is one of the best ways to achieve it. By defining revenue goals with respect to customer type and their needs, companies are better able to craft solutions that have real value for individual customers. By using a combination of paid advertising, targeted content marketing, market research and customer relationship management, revenue can continue to grow year after year.
Let's say that you have identified a specific set of customer types that you would like to target your sales messages or products towards. You might decide to use these as the basis for revenue goals. For instance, if you are targeting financial services professionals and are selling home security systems or online income management software, you might decide to start with $100K per year in revenues at the top of your revenue goals. This is based just on those two customer types that you have identified in the market research report from above. Now let's say that you determine that those two target customer types have an average revenue per employee of $20K per year. So, by targeting them, you will be able to reach $200K in annual revenues. You can take it a step further and add additional customer types based on the needs of other employees or new potential customers.
In addition to defining revenue goals by customer type, there are many other ways to define the parameters for growing your business beyond what you can do on your own.
When defining your revenue goals, it is important to understand the relationship between individual behaviors and changes in outcomes. For example, if you are using a product or service to provide peace of mind to potential customers and you want to hire another sales representative to use the service and get customers on board, you are more likely to reach your goals. If you are just hiring someone, but are not providing training or support, then reaching those goals will be harder. In this case, you may decide that it is best for your business if no new employees were hired or if they only had one employee who was dedicated to achieving the revenue goals.
A key point in determining revenue goals is that they should be defined with respect to your target market and their needs.