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

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

So, if you’re looking for a little supplementary reading, or if you want to gain a better understanding of revenue management, I’m about to cover:

• How it connects to tech
• And how to structure your strategy around it

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

Whether that means A/B testing campaign content for maximum conversions, or modifying your product offering according to consumer feedback, you need to strategize according to proving and improve your revenue.

Let’s Talk Tech

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

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

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, or marketing etc.

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

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, that your data sharing is next to nil, and that 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 the tools that you’ll use in your tech stack. Start with something that can grow with you, by covering 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, to increase conversions and 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.

But by keeping all your data in one place, by creating a 360-degree view of your customers, by really understanding them—to deliver better experiences that generate better revenue for your company—you give your customers the experience they deserve.

That personalized, data-driven experience is now essential, and anything else is underserving your customers—and missing out on potential revenue.

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

With this in mind, looking back at the landscape, you can already eliminate 90% of these options from your potential tech stack. Instead of looking at those smaller, non-scalable platforms, start looking at the 10% that will grow with you and help you achieve that growth

Companies like:

• Clickfunnels: Which provides the tools to build complete marketing and sales funnels
• Freshworks: Which covers everything from call center, to hiring, to support needs in one platform
• Infusionsoft: Which is perfect for small businesses looking for sales, marketing and CRM all at once

Of course, I also have to mention our own solution to this issue: Maropost for Commerce, which brings together marketing and commerce 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 2 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, to help your company generate better revenue—and optimizing every part of the customer journey for revenue is how you going beyond surviving to truly thriving.