How to Hit Your Audacious Revenue Goals with Limited Resources

I love the start of a new year with all the promise and challenges it represents. It’s easy to understand why I’d be excited about the opportunities, and I see many for Demandbase and our customers in 2023. But challenges? Yeah, I embrace them too, because I view them as a different kind of opportunity — an opportunity to grow and learn to do something better.

In 2023, a challenge facing most of us is the need to do more with less. For those of us in sales and marketing, that means hitting our revenue number while using fewer resources.

How are you going to do that? This is how I plan to tackle it. Hopefully you’ll find these tips helpful, as well.  

Re-evaluate account tiering

This is good to do at the beginning of every year, but especially important when you need to be relentlessly efficient. 

• Ask yourself, “Who are our best targets right now?” Be willing to make difficult decisions to ensure you have adequate resources for your top tiers. These are the ones that fuel your growth. You can’t afford to ignore them. 
• Lean heavily on intent data and predictive models to point you to the accounts that are most likely to buy. That’s the surest way to spend your resources where you’ll get the greatest return on your investment. 
• Ask, “Do we have the right balance of resources focused on prospects vs customers?” If you have a tendency to focus on new business, remember that it costs significantly less to retain existing customers than to gain new ones. But it’s also short-sighted to ignore new business altogether. The key is balance, keeping in mind what makes sense for your industry. 
• Involve your execs in priority accounts. Don’t wait for your sellers to ask. Be proactive and prescribe exec engagement in each top tier account plan. 

Find ways to increase accountability in the upper funnel

Because things run downhill, I suggest you carefully scrutinize what’s happening at the top of your funnel. Ask yourself: 

• What are the key activities that need to happen — the ad touches, calls, emails, etc that generate adequate volume and quality pipeline?” Are they being done every day, every week? Are you targeting the right accounts and decision-makers? 
• Are our MQL/SQL/Pipeline hand-offs optimized across marketing, SDRs, and sales? Do you have clear qualification criteria for each stage, and agreement across teams? If not, this adds friction that wastes valuable time and could cost you opportunities. Are your teams using the data and intelligence they have to decide where to focus their efforts and how best to engage? Not doing so is guaranteed to have them spinning their wheels.  
• Are discovery calls being run effectively? Are your teams trained on good discovery? Do your managers listen to call recordings and coach on how to improve? A good discovery call can set the stage for a faster, more valuable deal. And do you have good follow up? Nothing wastes a good discovery call more quickly than slow or poor follow-up.
• Are your teams skilled at addressing your prospects’ and customers’ pains points vs  pushing product? If not, coach them up. Having this skill is one of the surest ways to move accounts swiftly through your funnel.

Re-examine your product roadmap

This is another thing that’s good to do every year. It simply becomes more important when you can’t afford to miss the mark. No matter how good your sales and marketing teams are, they’ll be fighting an uphill battle if your products are buggy or not filling the needs in the market. Ask yourself:   

• Do we have alignment on priorities across our organization? And do your priorities reflect what your customers need most?
• Are we investing both on big revenue opportunities and long-term strategic vision? Don’t fall into the trap of ignoring your long-term vision if you want to come out of today’s rough economy stronger than ever.  

Build alignment across your org

This is not a time for low morale in your company. Everyone needs to be on board and motivated to achieve great things despite the challenges. If you’re part of the exec team at your company, this is the time to rise up and be a leader. Make sure: 

• Everyone owns the “more with less” mantra. Notice it’s not less with less; it’s more with less and that’s exciting!
• Trade-offs are fully understood and communicated.
• Wins are celebrated even more. 

I’m excited about 2023. I hope you are too. We have amazing customers who are doing great things with Demandbase One and we’re thrilled to support you along the journey. We have the best product roadmap we’ve ever had, balancing your current needs with investment in a truly forward-thinking vision. Stay tuned!

What else would you like me to write about? Send an email to gabeGTM@demandbase.com.