I've rarely, if ever, met an executive that was supremely confident their revenue machine was as lean and mean as other areas of their business. Typically, when I tell executives what I do, the flood gates open about their philosophy and approach to "sales and marketing". Following are the top four oversights I hear from executives that take a lot of profit away from their companies and impede their ability to increase revenue consistently.

Top 4 Revenue Performance Management Oversights That Cost You Money

1. Sales and marketing are treated as two functions, separate silos (inputs), within a company. In fact many smaller companies ignore the marketing function all together and bundle this into the sales process. The fastest growing companies manage revenue performance holistically; whereas, marketing is tasked with defining the sales targets and building marketing content that moves prospects from a point of awareness to a point of decision. Salespeople are tasked with persuading people to make a decision and overcome the barriers of resistance, apathy and most people's inherent aversion to change in the workplace. Sales and marketing is a process that should be aligned and optimized to produce the highest throughput at the lowest cost possible.
2. Sales people are treated as autonomous agents, expected to do all the work related to finding, winning and keeping customers. Salespeople end up spending very little time actually persuading someone to buy. This results in low throughput, costly turnover and more headcount than necessary to hit revenue targets. Inherent in this oversight, the sales person becomes the sales process instead of the sales person playing a role in the overall process to generate revenue profitably. In turn, the sales people become the focus of process improvement and the investment is lost when a salesperson turns over.
3. Executives don't properly fund their revenue machines and push salespeople beyond their limits, which often leads to performance issues. Based on our research, most companies underfund the revenue machine by at least 50%, forgetting marketing is a cost of doing business and really penalize their organizations by cutting corners and investing in big buildings or operations.
4. They don't have standards with metrics to monitor the customer acquistion process scientifically and mathematically from click to close. This oversight makes it difficult to determine precisely how much revenue is needed to sell all of the company's remaining capacity. Simply, you can't manage what you don't measure. If you don't measure you are forced to make decisions related to sales and marketing based on a "gut feeling" or anecdotal data.