Contenu connexe Similaire à How HighTech CEOs Can Grow Revenues Using a Revenue Capture Scorecard Similaire à How HighTech CEOs Can Grow Revenues Using a Revenue Capture Scorecard (20) How HighTech CEOs Can Grow Revenues Using a Revenue Capture Scorecard1. How HighTech CEOs Can Grow Revenues Using a
Revenue Capture Scorecard
Accelerating Growth Using a Premeditated, Planned Process
A Value Forward ® White Paper
2. Contents
Executive Summary............................................2
Best Practices Needed To Grow Your
High Tech Business.............................................3
Knowledge Needed For Prospects to
Buy............................................................... 3
Knowledge Needed to Sell and Market IT... 4
The Best Practice Needed To Be
Implemented Today For Success.................. 5
Revenue Capture Is A Company
Responsibility...Not Just The Sales Teams!... 6
Revenue Capture Is An Integrated Process.....6
4 Reasons Why Most IT Businesses Fail
to Build a Scalable Revenue Capture
Program Consistently Year After Year.......... 7
What Is The Revenue Capture Scorecard®
.... 9
Conclusion........................................................10
Executive Summary
Strategy Without Execution or a Planned
Process Is Wasted Thought!
Success in the high tech industry is an ever-
changing roadmap that must be proactively
managed by best practices, thought leadership
and the implementation of business operating
metrics that are measured.
Success is today’s economy requires a planned
process that focuses on execution.
Success is defined by Merriam-Webster’s
dictionary as “a: degree or measure of
succeeding; b: favorable or desired outcome;
also: the attainment of wealth, favor, or
eminence.” This definition clearly characterizes
what most CEOs of privately held and public
high tech companies seek in their role as
the senior business executive in charge. The
combination of using measurement, attaining
a defined outcome and creating wealth is the
foundation of any successful business growth
system. Why start an IT company without
being successful or creating wealth? Why seek
success without having a defined outcome or a
measurable process?
Yes, strategy is important but without
execution, it is wasted thought. Great
2 © 2013 Paul R. DiModica
3. technology ideas are everywhere, but how often
are these opportunities implemented using
a premeditated approach that maximizes the
concepts’ potential for profit and success?
To be a successful IT company, execution is
more important than just a great idea. Steve
Jobs, former CEO and Founder of Apple, did
not invent the PC, portable music headset or
cell phone but he implemented his unique
design and marketing fusion approach to
product delivery and became a billionaire.
Marc Benioff, CEO and Founder of Salesforce.
com, did not invent the concept of capturing
and managing customer data for marketing
purposes. He just executed his business plan
better. Yet, Twitter CEO and Founder Evan
Williams has a great idea too, but so far, no
profits.
By reading this white paper, you will learn
specific strategic and tactical action steps
to analyze your current operational process,
techniques to manage your department systems,
and methodologies to increase marketing
success and corporate profits. The outlined
action steps provide a blueprint to examine
where you are and where you want to be to
achieve your high tech success objectives.
Best Practices NeededTo Grow
Your HighTech Business
To grow an IT company organically at the
lowest revenue capture cost, CEOs must set
aside their own experiences and understand
their buyers’ objectives based on research and
communicate in a format that targeted buyers
can understand and respond too.
When designing a scalable business model,
create drivers that focus on the buyer’s needs…
not yours. Your development costs, G & A
overhead or your sales cycle length are all
irrelevant to the buyer you are trying to induce
to take an action step to buy.
To grow your technology, software or
professional service business, you must manage
the intersection of the knowledge needed to
understand why your prospects buy (or don’t
buy) from you and the knowledge needed to
sell and market to your prospects.
Knowledge Needed For Prospects to
Buy
To get buyers to buy, you must analyze why
they buy and integrate those answers into your
business revenue capture process and operating
models. In today’s economic market, there are
five reasons why prospects buy IT – only five.
© 2013 Paul R. DiModica 3
4. They are:
1. How does your high tech product or
service increase income for the buyer
(business-to-business market)
2. How does your high tech product or
service decrease expenses for the buyer
(business-to-business market)
3. How does your high tech offering
manage the buyer’s risks or business
consequences (business-to-business
market)
4. How does your high tech offering make
the buyer become more agile in their
business process (business-to-business
market)
5. How does your high tech offering
make the buyer feel good (business-to-
consumer market)
Knowledge Needed to Sell and
Market IT
When building out your strategic positioning,
pricing schedules, marketing methodology,
financial investment benchmarks and sales
process, three questions need to be answered:
1. Why would prospects buy from me?
2. Why would prospects not buy from
me?
3. How do I create value that prospects
believe?
When these strategic eight questions are
answered correctly, they create a symbiotic
foundation on how to grow revenues in an IT
firm.
4 © 2013 Paul R. DiModica
5. If you are a senior executive of a privately
held or publicly funded IT firm, you have
a fiduciary responsibility to understand the
answers to these questions and how they should
be used as revenue capture tools for all of your
departments to operate correctly.
When answering these questions, you cannot
just use generic or perceived responses—you
must focus on researched data. You must be
specific. If you don’t know, then you need
to do some discovery to determine the exact
answers.
Once you have this data, you then need to
integrate the answers into your marketing
message, your sales process, your financial
business model, your customer service and
operational departments design, and your
overall corporate strategy and your brand
positioning.
The Best Practice Needed To Be
Implemented Today For Success
The best practices for you to grow your
technology or professional service company
is managing the intersection of these eight
questions and their answers to build a
replicable and scalable business revenue
capture model.
When the correct answers to these eight
questions are determined, you can create the
building blocks of recurring revenue capture.
Inaccurate answers for these questions based
on gut feel, department manager perceptions
and aged market research force management
teams to make incorrect business decisions
and investments in sales, marketing, corporate
strategy, financial budget models and funding
allocations.
© 2013 Paul R. DiModica 5
6. Revenue Capture Is A Company
Responsibility… Not Just The Sales
Teams!
It is easy to blame salespeople when they
don’t hit their assigned sales quota. And yes,
they are responsible. Yet most technology and
professional service companies incorrectly
calculate the firm’s sales quota. Sales quota
accuracy is the company key performance
indicator (K.P.I.) that the rest of the firm
operates from. When your sales quota is
incorrectly calculated, it affects your marketing
budgets, your IT staff bench utilization rates,
your engineering and development department
costs, your cash flow, your corporate general
and administrative (G&A) costs, and your
operating margins.
High tech firms organizationally operate like
an assembly line with multiple moving gears
and levers working in tandem simultaneously.
When the machinery system slows down
or does not function correctly, the whole
production system fails.
Revenue Capture Is An Integrated
Process
Why is the sales team responsible if there is no
market demand for your offering?
Why is the sales team responsible for bad
customer service and support?
Why is the sales team responsible if the offering
is incorrectly priced?
Why is the sales team responsible if a new
software application is released too early?
Why is the sales team responsible if your
professional services project team or
applications do not work as marketed?
Why is the sales team responsible when the
marketing department does not generate any
qualified leads?
Why is the sales team responsible if you are
selling blue shoes to a red shoe market?
In today’s operating environment, if your
revenue and profits are down, or your current
market growth is not hitting your projections,
6 © 2013 Paul R. DiModica
7. it is the company’s responsibility… not just the
sales team’s responsibility.
To maximize your high tech revenue, you must
integrate your strategy, marketing, sales and
finance into one outbound revenue capture
program where all departments are focused on
the corporate goal of accelerated growth.
Today’s Economic Environment Holds
No Mercy For Any High Tech Business
That Makes Mistakes
Today, managing a privately-held family
business or a corporate conglomerate is a
challenging career choice fraught with financial
risks, legal issues, extensive stress, difficult
business decisions, and sometimes upset family
members.
The world is full of great new technology
ideas, extensively documented new business
approaches and detailed reports on what you
should do to increase your IT business success,
but without action, why waste your time.
4 Reasons Why Most IT Businesses
Succeed Year After Year
Since 2001, we have been compiling a best
practices analysis of hundreds of technology,
software and professional service firms we
have worked with and have identified four
specific business drivers that help high tech
firms grow top line revenues.
Growing a high tech business is not easy. But,
there are four proven factors that are currently
working in today’s economic environment you
can use to create a success framework that
will move your organization’s performance to
increased growth.
They are:
1. Understand that revenue capture is a
company responsibility.
2. Don’t sell and market your IT offering;
instead sell the business results it
creates for the buyer.
3. Always manage your entire business by
metrics. Sales, marketing, operations,
finance and customer service
departments can all be a planned,
measured process.
4. Manage your business model process
professionally. Professionally managed
business processes operate proactively
not reactively. The difference between
a professionally managed business
process and an entrepreneurially
managed business process is metrics
and planning.
© 2013 Paul R. DiModica 7
8. Another lesson learned through our best
practice research is that:
In IT, your “intellectual property” is not
your technology—it is the strength of
your revenue capture distribution.
IT companies often are led by management
teams who are technically trained. Having
great technology means nothing, if you cannot
market, distribute and sell the technology. Why
did IBM buy Price Waterhouse? As a $100
billion company, they could have started an
accounting advisory group and taken market
share. Instead, they bought a distribution
channel that was already in place. Why did
Larry Ellison buy PeopleSoft? His army of staff
programmers and aggressive salespeople could
have built the product and captured market
share without paying a premium valuation, but
it was easier to buy the distribution channel and
market share – than build it.
To expand your current high tech company,
you must focus at least equally (if not more) on
how your offering is going to be marketed, sold
and distributed. Without distribution . . . all
you have is a great idea and an IT offering that
prospects cannot buy.
In high tech, good quality is good
enough.
This theorem appears to contradict a common
perception by technology-driven firms that the
best technology always increases revenues—
but the world is full of failed IT companies
who had great technology. The intellectual
property of IT companies today is not IT—it is
the strength of your strategy, marketing, sales
process, and distribution.
The Revenue Capture Scorecard® -
Driving Business Growth Through
Metrics, Planning and Best Practices
To grow IT businesses, the executive
management team needs to integrate strategy,
marketing, sales and financial management
into one outbound revenue capture program.
The business success tool to accomplish this
objective is the Revenue Capture Scorecard®
.
8 © 2013 Paul R. DiModica
9. What Is The Revenue Capture
Scorecard®
It is estimated that over 70% of the Global
1000 public companies use a Balanced
Scorecard strategy in some format in all or in
parts of their operating business units. But after
being exposed to this scorecard methodology
as the Vice President of Strategy Worldwide
for Renaissance Worldwide (the company that
acquired the Balanced Scorecard consulting
firm by book author David Norton), I found
an operational success gap in the Balanced
Scorecard approach of how to make a company
successful.
The Revenue Capture Scorecard® goes beyond
the original Balanced Scorecard concept. The
foundational concept of the Balanced Scorecard
is that management must align the four
business process perspectives of Customers,
Learning and Growth, Financial, and Internal
Business Process to improve operational
performance.
From my experiences as a vice president of
sales, marketing, strategy, and operations in
different technology companies at different
times, I knew that having great IT development
and engineering departments meant nothing
if you could not create a revenue distribution
model that was scalable and successful.
The Balanced Scorecard concept has
tremendous merit, scholarship, and case
studies behind it on why it works for well-
established, large conglomerates—who are
seeking to increase their business infrastructure
management performance. But to use it as a
tool to increase revenue growth is suspect, at
best, for large companies and fails to address
the needs of small to midsized companies (IT
and otherwise) on how to build a replicable and
scalable revenue capture program.
In business:
PR is not revenue.
Marketing is not revenue.
Advertising is not revenue.
Branding is not revenue.
Development is not revenue.
Revenue is revenue.
So, taking my experiences based on my
business success model development and
assessing the analytical concepts and success
gaps of the Balanced Scorecard, I created a
new process we call the “Revenue Capture
Scorecard®
.”
High tech CEOs and senior business executives
seeking to grow their top line revenues and
increase success must integrate marketing,
© 2013 Paul R. DiModica 9
10. sales, financial management, and strategy to
maximize business growth.
Holistic, Sustainable Growth Only
Comes From A Corporate Commitment
To An Integrated Revenue Capture
Process
You cannot run a high tech business on
assumptions. You need to know the specific
reasons why prospects buy and do not buy and
then integrate this information vertically into
every department’s approach and make it their
operational DNA. Accept that you do not sell
IT products or services—rather you sell the
results produced by your technology offering or
the protection from business consequences or
risks.
Conclusion
Aligning the departments of sales, marketing,
strategy and finance into a revenue capture
program is a key business driver needed to
create a scalable business growth model in
today’s changing economic environment.
Without a dedicated effort in this direction,
IT company revenue growth becomes a
decentralized process where departments
operate as silos without best practice
measurement or action step leadership.
High tech business success is a premeditated
process based on knowledge, execution and
measurement. To facilitate the desired business
outcome of accelerated growth, high tech
firms must complete a 360° analysis of their
current business revenue capture model and
buyer driver and build a metric-driven planned
process.
Companies that adopt this measured approach
will seize the opportunity and create an agile
revenue growth position—that is sustainable in
any economic market.
AboutThe Author
Paul DiModica is the founder and CEO of
Value Forward Group, a high tech revenue
capture specialist advisement, M&A and
management consulting firm. Paul is also editor
of the IT sales, strategy and marketing strategy
newsletter called HighTechSuccess read by
high tech executives in over 110 countries
worldwide (www.hightechsuccess.com).
Additionally, he is the author of the books
High Tech CEO Business Success Strategies,
How to Sell Technology®
and his new book
the Revenue Capture Scorecard®
.
Prior to launching the Value Forward Group
in 2001, Paul spent over 20 years in high
tech businesses as a Senior Vice President
10 © 2013 Paul R. DiModica
11. of Sales and Marketing, Vice President of
Strategy Worldwide (Renaissance Worldwide
Inc.), Vice President of Operations, Chief
Operating Officer and company founder in
private, family-run and public IT companies
with annual revenues up to $900 million.
Paul has been featured or interviewed in
hundreds of media outlets including the
New York Times, Investors Daily, Fox
News, Selling Power Magazine, Sales and
Marketing Magazine, CIO Magazine, CFO
Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Training
Magazine, Marketing Magazine, Computer
World Magazine, Entrepreneur Radio,
Chicago Tribune, Executive Travel Magazine,
Value Added Partners and many others.
AboutValue Forward Group
The Value Forward Group is a high tech
business success advisement consulting
firm. We focus on helping CEOs, company
founders and senior executive team members
of technology, software and professional
service companies maximize revenue,
increase marketing success, reduce operating
expenses and build a replicable and scalable
revenue capture process that gives them a
competitive edge. For more information
about Value Forward programs and services,
please contact:
Paul DiModica
770-632-7647
pdimodica@valueforward.com
www.valueforward.com
© 2013 Paul R. DiModica 11
12. Kickstart Your Revenue Generation Program
Are you looking to increase your success in today’s sales and marketing
environment?
Identifying prospective buyers, understanding the forces that
drive them to buy and communicating your value requires a
company core competencies analysis, business model financial
calculation, sales and marketing framework development, and
a premeditated plan to maximize your firm’s success.
Value Forward Group can help you increase your success
in selling to businesses or government entities using best
practices, research and execution. At the Value Forward Group,
we understand today’s market and can work with you to put a
success plan together.
Call today to discuss how we can help you plan your strategy to
reach your goals.
770-632-7647 www.PaulDiModica.com