Which of the Three Revenue Games Are You Playing?

Preparation + perspiration – interference = your potential for business success

Achieving specific goals?

The first step most take in their businesses is setting revenue goals and using their achievement as a key measure of success. They may start with an annual revenue target in mind, but quickly learn the key to achieving an annual goal is to know how much revenue that translates to on a quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily basis.

(It’s really only when you break it down further that you begin to clearly see how your marketing efforts must be comprehensive and diverse as well as strategically aligned and well timed to make achieving any revenue goal possible.)

Dollars, of course, are not the only revenue-related measurement. You might also decide you want to achieve other revenue-driving goals as well such as:

• converting buyers through social media marketing
• growing the number of leads
• increasing the number of lead sources
• improving the amount and frequency of each purchase transaction
• introducing client/customer retention and referral programs

However, this is not the only way to play the revenue game — here are two others you can try on for size.

Improving revenue performance?

You’re probably already keeping an eye on your web and sales analytics (and, if you’re not, you should be).

We need to apply analytics to our business data to help us understand, describe, predict and improve our results. The next level of play is managing revenue performance. This is a matter of doing everything we can to be selling the right product, to the right customer, at the right time, for the right price. That’s how you optimize revenue growth.

The essence of this management discipline is understanding how our clients and customers perceive product and service value and then accurately aligning our prices, placement and availability with each customer segment.

Because naturally you are targeting and converting more than just one type of customer, right? (If you were to stick only with a one-size-fits-all philosophy in your marketing and sales processes, you would not be creating all the revenue possible from selling your products and services.)

Driving value through innovation?

Once you’ve mastered the first two plays, you’ll be ready to stretch yourself even further by tackling innovation.

Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, has said that the ability to innovate is the one core competency every business must have. Just because we’re small, doesn’t mean we aren’t affected by change and don’t need to concern ourselves with innovation as a means of remaining competitive and viable over the long term.

In fact, I think smaller businesses need to pay even closer attention to the changing economy and environment simply because we don’t have significant amounts of cash available to keep ourselves going when tides turn ugly and start cutting into our revenues.

So how do we fuel innovation? By keeping the ideas and creativity constantly flowing. That doesn’t just mean redesigning our products and services. It can also mean changing up our client/customer mix, our business development and marketing strategies, our internal and customer-facing processes and how we work with others and manage our businesses.

Opportunities to innovate are everywhere. Small businesses are uniquely positioned to be nimble in pursuing them. So follow your heart and boldy go. Remember, there's no Plan B for Your A Game.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Linda M. Lopeke, Founder of SMARTSTART, helps entrepreneurs, experts and professional services providers make competition irrelevant and join the 1% who succeed in business online.

She leads a $50M philanthropy program that helps digital business owners build their dreams with access to subsidized expert professional guidance made possible through corporate sponsorship. Don't let your business dreams die. Learn more about this innovative program and apply here.