Revenue Management and the Tools You Need to Survive in Today's Consumer Market

We all have this in common. No matter our country, industry, or role…

The need for revenue management. It’s essential to every business.

Give your business the means to produce better experiences for your customers so you can generate better revenue for your company.

And that’s what I wanted to talk about today.

With Traffic & Conversion Summit 2018 fast approaching, I wanted to provide a deeper look at the topic I’ll be talking about there on Day 2—revenue management—because there’s so much more to this than I’ll ever be able to say on stage…

When you’re adapting your business strategy for optimal revenue, you need to bear in mind the effects and outcomes on revenue in every business decision you make.

Whether that means…

…you need to strategize according to proving and improving your revenue.

So, you can gain a better understanding of revenue management, I’m about to cover:

How revenue management connects to tech
How to structure your business strategy around revenue management

And the biggest factor in making those decisions towards optimal revenue is technology…

Let’s Talk Tech

In short, the tools you need to survive in today’s consumer market can be found in your tech stack.

Let's Talk Tech

But not just any tech, it needs to be tech that:

Tracks performance, so you can see what’s working (and what isn’t), and optimize accordingly
Gathers more data on customers, so you can analyze and understand who they are and what they want
Adapts with you so you can remain agile and adaptable as your business scales

The biggest goal of your tech tools is to give your business the means to produce better experiences for your customers so you can generate better revenue for your company.

Your Tech Stack Today

But the problem is that most people don’t build their tech stacks out with these principles in mind—that is to say, they don’t make technology decisions with maximum revenue in mind.

Instead of choosing tech that…

Analyzes and optimizes performance
Creates a 360-degree view of customers
And scales with you

…most tech stack building goes a little something like this:

You’re a small business looking for a platform to handle your sales, CRM, service, commerce, marketing, etc.

So, you start by looking at the offerings on the market…

Source: chiefmartec.com

Between the freemium services, the enterprise solutions, the specific tools, and the multi-functional suites, you get overwhelmed.

There’s too much choice and that’s where the tech problems that plague businesses of all sizes begin.

(NOTE: Get the next best thing to actually being at Traffic & Conversion Summit 2018—Livestream. Watch T&C live, as it happens, from the comfort of your home to get cutting-edge digital marketing strategies, all for less than the price of one ticket! Learn more now .)

Getting Started

In the face of all these options, most small businesses choose to start, well, small.

They pick a solution built for small businesses. More than that, they tend towards solutions designed to handle a small area of a small business.

These are usually inexpensive, easily adopted options—and they solve the problem you’re having at that specific moment.

Scaling Up

The small business specific platforms are great when you first adopt them, but they become their own problems as your business begins to grow.

And somewhere down the line—typically after you’ve already adopted 10 or 15 of these small platforms—you realize that…

They aren’t integrating
Your data sharing is next to nil
And you’ve lost sight of how different areas of your business work together as a whole

When it gets to this point, it’s overwhelming.

More importantly, it’s costing you revenue.

Looking Back…

But there’s a way to solve this problem before it becomes a problem.

And that’s by changing the way you choose software as a small business. So, you can skip the scalability issues once your small business stops being a small business.

This shift begins by keeping revenue outcomes in mind when choosing your tech stack tools.

Start with something that can grow with you and can cover more areas of your business in fewer platforms.

Fewer Platforms—More Data

Fewer platforms in your tech stack means more data on your business.

It’s a simple principle:

To prevent critical customer and company data from falling through the cracks, you need to have fewer cracks.

Consolidating your platforms by investing in one comprehensive platform that can grow with your business is how you future-proof your business and optimize for long-term revenue.

The more data you have on your customers, the more you can improve their experiences. Which will in turn increase conversions and customer loyalty.

Invest Today to Grow Tomorrow

Once you start building your tech stack with this in mind, there is one trade-off—you may have to spend more upfront.

Anything else is underserving your customers—and causing you to miss out on potential revenue.

But by…

Keeping all your data in one place
And by creating a 360-degree view of your customers

…you’ll be able to truly understand your customers and your revenue—so you can give your customers the experience they deserve and generate better revenue for your company.

That personalized, data-driven experience is now essential. Anything else is underserving your customers—and causing you to miss out on potential revenue.

Over time, the investment in the technology driving these experiences pays for itself.

With this in mind, looking back at the landscape, you can eliminate the vast majority of these options from your potential tech stack.

Source: chiefmartec.com

Instead of looking at those smaller, non-scalable platforms, start looking at the ones that will grow with you and help you achieve that growth.

Companies like:

ClickFunnels: Provides the tools to build complete marketing and sales funnels
Freshworks: Covers everything from call center to hiring to support needs in one platform
Infusionsoft: Great for small businesses looking for sales, marketing, and CRM all at once

Of course, we may be biased 😉 but there’s our own solution to this issue: Maropost Sales Cloud, which brings together CRM, service, commerce, sales automation (and more) in one platform.

The Solution

Whatever you choose, it’s essential to look at your tech stack as something that needs to grow with you, so you don’t end up two years down the line with too many solutions and not enough results.

And that means change the way you adopt tech now, so you can grow later.

The tech stack you build needs to be able to bring together data from different areas of your company for deeper insights into your customers, to help you build your business and its revenue.

Don’t just buy your software as a small business—buy it as a scaling business.

It’s this attitude adjustment that helps you deliver better customer experiences and helps you better manage your revenue.

And optimizing every part of the customer journey for revenue is how you go beyond surviving to truly thriving.

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