Strategies to Keep Revenue from Slipping Away

Since implementing Altify’s system, Autodesk has seen its sales win rates increase by nearly 85 percent. “In our million-dollar-and-up deals, we got from a 14.8 percent close rate to 48 percent,” says Julie Sokley, vice president of sales operations at Autodesk. “The average deal is almost $700,000 bigger. This approach works.”

For other organizations looking to make similar moves, it’s not an overnight transformation. There are cultural and methodology changes that have to be made, new technologies that have to be brought in, and commitments from upper management and sales leaders that have to be secured.

But even before that, the first step in the process has to be identifying the revenue leaks. This will undoubtedly be a companywide effort requiring assistance from billing, finance, service, sales, operations, presales, and other departments. Key questions to consider during this phase include the following:

• Where are you losing revenue?
• Are you reaching out broadly enough to customers?
• Are you encountering a lot of product warranty work and fix issues?
• Are you failing to capitalize on intelligence gathered from your service operation?
• Are you encountering faulty pricing and discounting?

“The questions I get asked the most are around not getting enough deals in the pipeline or in getting deals to the top of the pipeline,” Reynolds says. “The problem so often is that companies are asking themselves these questions when they are looking at the end of a [sales] cycle. They have a tendency to look at how they closed when what they need to do instead is to look at the early parts of the sales cycle and ask themselves, ‘How could I have identified my ideal customer profile better?’ Instead of working on 10 deals and hoping to get three, they might be better off focusing on seven high-quality customer profiles and shooting for four deals.”

Software can do a lot, but it can’t do it alone. For this reason, companies looking to combat or prevent revenue leakage will need to find the right blend of people and technology, experts agree.

Dickie recalls one organization that was quick to deploy artificial intelligence and bots in its contact center to ultimately eliminate humans. While this might work for some organizations, it won’t work everywhere, he cautions.

“Companies are looking at bot technology because they are trying to remove the need to interact with their customers, but this is shortsighted,” he states.

“If you’ve automated a business process that enables your customers to automatically renew products themselves, you might meet the needs of 85 percent of your customers, but that still leaves 15 percent who need a human to interact with during the transaction. If you automated an email process to your customer and haven’t heard back for one and a half weeks, then it’s time to get a human involved. Companies have to learn where to automate, when it’s time to get a human involved, and what’s the right combination of tech versus touch.”

The right sales systems, artificial intelligence, and old-fashioned coaching and training can also identify subject matter experts to help in the sales process when needed.

But no matter why it happens and which steps companies take to combat it, success can only be had when companies start to take revenue leakage seriously.

“You have to make revenue leakage a priority,” Dickie says emphatically. “Revenue leakage shouldn’t just be a sales management issue; it should be a board-level issue. If you can reduce your customer churn, streamline the implementation processes for the products and services your customer buys, or create interest in your products and services in other company divisions, these acts can be real game changers. Everyone who is a customer touchpoint should be involved because the customer relationship is an enterprise-wide issue.” 

Mary Shacklett is a freelance writer and president of Transworld Data, a technology analytics, market research, and consulting firm. She can be reached at mshacklett@twdtransworld.com.