Highlights
- Business growth recommendations without supporting data are just somebody's opinion. The Johnny Grow Revenue Growth Framework is built on evidence-based best practices and backed by industry specific benchmark data. It shows what the highest growth firms do differently than their peers, and how they do it.
- The framework draws on industry research to surface and replicate the most influential business growth strategies and best practices proven by the Best-in-Class companies (e.g., the top 15%.)
- The business growth research findings show the right mix of strategies, best practices and technology automation to create a repeatable growth model and your company revenue engine.
A Prescriptive Revenue Growth Framework
We work with companies to solve a common challenge – how to achieve significant and sustained revenue and profit growth.
The Johnny Grow Revenue Growth Framework is a proprietary 3-step model that brings simplicity and data-driven direction to systemically grow company revenues. Many in the industry refer to this as their revenue engine.
There are dozens of things you can do to accelerate sales and every one of them delivers a different result. Some work and many don't. Executives don't want to experiment over extended periods to figure out what works. They want to quickly know the shortest route to their destination.
The Revenue Growth Formula models, forecasts, and compares best practices and financial levers to quickly prioritize those that maximize company growth. It's a precision approach and alternative to pursuing growth by investing in arbitrary strategies and best guess explorations.
Here's how it works.
Step 1 applies Predictive Analytics. These are pro forma financial models built with company data and industry benchmarks. They identify the best practices that will deliver the desired sales uplift. These predictive models forecast, compare and rank the financial impact of revenue growth best practices so that the company can select those that deliver the maximum result in the least time, cost and risk.
Step 2 is a Growth Playbook. Plays provide guidance and operational instruction for best practices. Many times, they are execution plans with sequenced activities, progress milestones, phase gates, performance metrics and exit criteria. Other times they are brief but pointed recommendations such as next best action.
Step 3 is the Growth Analytics. It's the business intelligence that measures progress and flags variances in need of swift remediation. Data fuels the revenue engine.
Here's a drill down into the three steps.
Prioritize the Best Practices that Maximize Impact
Research shows that the highest growth companies design an all-of-company revenue model. Every revenue producing department applies data-driven methods that achieve predicted outcomes and roll-up to company results.
Financial goals are broken down by contributing department. For example, the top marketing goals may include growing marketing's contribution to the sales pipeline and earned income. Top sales goals may include increasing salesforce productivity or maximizing sales close rates. Service goals may include using customer data to deliver differentiated customer experiences or shifting customer service from a cost center to profit center.
The Revenue Growth Framework saves time by first illustrating the goals and methods that produced the biggest gains for the highest growth companies. When you repeat the actions that most drive company growth for the industry's top performers you can realize similar results.
The goals and their supporting best practices are compared by using predictive analytics to forecast revenue and profit impact.
A recurring pattern among low growth companies is that they don't know what methods deliver the biggest financial uplift. So, they pursue what they know instead of what is most effective. This results in a best-case scenario of incremental and delayed growth, or a much more likely scenario of preserving the status quo.
A smarter approach is to apply data and predictive analytics to calculate the least cost route to a targeted financial goal. This forecast modeling allows you to rank the best practices by their contribution. They can then be prioritized, and the company can pursue the biggest uplift opportunities first.
The predictive models also use industry benchmarks. This makes it easy for management to recognize where the company stands relative to competitors. It also allows managers to apply What-If analysis or compare different uplift scenarios to see how they deliver varying revenues and profits.
This first step is essentially your growth strategy. It defines what to do.
It steps up your planning from experimenting with unsupported growth initiatives based on good intentions or best guesses to data-driven best practices that calculate outcomes based on research that shows what the industry's top growth firms did; and how they did it.
If you skip this strategy step, your methods become suspect, your execution becomes aimless, and your measure of success is unclear.
Use an Execution Playbook for Repeatable Outcomes
Step 2 moves from precision planning to prescriptive execution.
The Revenue Growth Framework Playbook is a collection of prescriptive plays that make best practices operational.
In step 1 we define the strategy to make sure we're doing the right things. In this step we define the execution to make sure we're doing those things right. Or put another way, where the prior step quantitatively shows what the company should do to deliver the biggest financial impact, the Playbook defines the best ways to do it.
Best Practice plays deliver clear guidance, sequential instruction and contextual recommendations at exactly the point where they can be applied to achieve a defined business outcome. They are not pie in the sky suggestions, but instead roadmaps that sequence the necessary tasks to achieve a goal in a predictable way.
Playbook Plays orchestrate best practices to deliver the maximum growth in the minimum time.
The above Playbook Blueprint is an example that shows selected best practices to be used by Marketing to increase marketing's revenue contribution to the company. Plays support each targeted goal with evidence-based best practices that include sequential process instruction, integrated technology, measurement metrics and forecasted payback.
The metrics are updated in a performance dashboard that uses pre-configured alerts for real-time variance notifications.
Apply Growth Analytics to Measure and Adjust
The thing about growth plans is that they seldom go according to plan. That's why your revenue engine needs analytics.
Performance dashboards display the most important key performance indicators (KPI) in an easy to consume visual interface. They prioritize role-based information to show what should be done first, and then next, and so on. They identify deviations and trouble spots in real-time so staff can quickly intervene with timely course corrections.
Most company reporting displays historical data. Better reporting shifts from lagging to leading indicators. And the best reporting enables metrics to be interactive, so managers can perform What-If modeling and scenario planning.
An interesting thing about revenue engine dashboards is that staff spend less time finding and assembling data and more time applying insights to make frequent changes to operational execution. That's the sign of successful reporting. If the information is causing operational changes to be made, it's working.
Business Intelligence is one of only four sustainable competitive advantages. It's sustainable because making timely and accurate business decisions never loses its value.
See the 3 step Revenue Growth Framework to create a revenue engine that maximizes sales generation in the least time, cost and risk.
Click to Tweet