Pricing Power: the art of raising prices without reducing demand

‍

According to our study on data-driven revenue growth, nearly 8 in 10 leaders find it challenging for their companies to gain pricing power. Yet, most feel that doing so will be "very” or "extremely important" to driving profitable revenue growth in the next 12 months.

Something has to give.

Commoditized products and one-size-fits-all solutions are obstacles to overcome. With events, these include square footage, branding and activations and attendee experience. In digital businesses, commodities and all-purpose approaches are found in  lead generation, data subscriptions, display advertising, programmatic advertising, and in some cases, content subscriptions.

Regardless of your model, optimizing pricing to reflect the value delivered can be a valuable driver of growth and revenue without incurring additional expenses. However, perceived value depends on the customer segment and the account.

It’s important to find the right leverage points. Leverage can be gained with specific types of customers, offerings, programs and audiences.

To shed light on these leverage points, media, event and information businesses must thoroughly understand:

• The needs of advertisers, sponsors and/or exhibitors
• The needs of audience members, site visitors, event attendees, subscribers
• The customer journey and experience required to excite, delight, engage and retain 
• The activation framework that successfully ignites meaningful connections
• The decision-support tools, integrations, and platforms customers need to improve how they do their jobs every day 
• The unique advantage that can be delivered to each

Pricing Power in Action: Sell-Side

Let’s review a few examples of pricing power on the sell-side of the customer equation for a company that provides digital advertising and lead generation.  (Most of these principles also  apply to event companies driven by revenue from exhibits and sponsorships, since they are all about delivering audiences too).

Lead Value

Using algorithms to determine audience value and charging accordingly. Not all leads are worth the same. In fact, the same lead may be worth much more to one sponsor segment than to another. 

We suggest using an algorithm that includes five core buckets of data:

• ICP/BP to Your Brand: Demographic data by industry, size, location, title and function mapped to your brand.
• ICP/BP to the Customer Segment: Demographic data by industry, size, location, title and function mapped to the customer segment. 
• Brand engagement: digital engagement, event attendance, direct monetization, and indirect monetization. Each engagement point has a value which compounds with increased engagement.
• Buyer intent: engagement with first and third party content, search activity, and workflow activity such as product information saves and shares, submissions for more information, lead conversion. For complex purchases such as enterprise software, buying activity by additional contacts from the same organization should impact the score.
• Recency & Demand: The value that audience members bring to the table is not fixed but, rather, varies depending on factors such as time and sponsor interest. 

These things matter because, to marketers, not all leads are created equally. Some agriculture manufacturers, for example, will pay dearly to reach farmers who are planning to grow more acres of a certain crop next year.

Enterprise software and high tech companies will pay top dollar to reach VP plus titles in critical buying roles that work within specific sectors of the business. SAP’s manufacturing industry vertical wants to find in-market buyers in Cargill’s Industrial Division across the manufacturing, finance, and operations VP functions. But guess what, so do Oracle, IBM, and Microsoft. Demand should drive up price and also provide a barrier to over engagement with a very high quality, sought after lead.

Data Wraps

Wrapping existing products with data in the form of insights adds tremendous value for advertisers, exhibitors and sponsors. Data wraps not only allow you to command higher prices and create compelling upsell opportunities, data wraps create new customer experiences, improve satisfaction and increase lifetime value.

Reports, alerts, dashboards, visualizations to complement products and delight customers. 

Performance Dashboards: For event businesses, sponsors can improve their lead generation efforts through the right mix of booth space, branding activations, and marketing programs. With real-time dashboards and reports, you can keep a finger on the pulse of performance and gain valuable insights about what works and what doesn't. Invest in timely monitoring of program stats to refine elements that make your campaigns thrive. Dashboards can provide marketers with real-time insights into highly engaged prospects that may also be attending the event they are exhibiting at. Their sales teams can then take action and schedule appointments with prospects most predisposed to meeting.

For digital businesses driven by lead generation and advertising, dashboards on campaign performance, insights on audience engagement, intent, demographic/firmographic profiles and  metrics  synced with internal data from clients all add value.

Real-Time Data Cleansing & Feeds: Real-time data cleansing and feeds works well for lead generation customers who require things like net new,  in ICP/BP target zones,  email verification and data mapping to CRM fields. Take this a step further and offer the API to send cleansed leads directly into their CRM in almost real-time. Game changer and customers will pay for it.

Data-Enhanced Lead Generation:, Enhance leads with additional data culled from purchase intent behaviors in addition to structured data fields. Additional data can include scores based on how many people from the company have also visited your website and done similar searches, engagement with competitive assets, and buyer activities such as saving, sharing, and comparing competitive products side-by-side. Think ZoomInfo data but in your owned environment. You can offer lead generation programs in two levels: basic which includes the regular data you provide and enhanced which includes the “extra.”

For event companies, value can be added by providing customers with intent data on attendee engagement and interests:

• Pre-event, so exhibitors and sponsors can prioritize prospect meetings in advance. 
• During events, so exhibitors can know if attendees visited their competitors booths, which sessions were of interest and more.
• After events, so customers can know if attendees and leads expressed any changes in intent after their event experience.

Pricing Power in Action: Buy-Side

Let’s dive into the buy-side. 

VIP Experiences at Events

Keynote Speaker Meetups: Who doesn’t like some extra attention? Creating unique experiences specifically for important customers (or attendees) can make a big difference. One approach is to give exclusive access to hear high demand speakers with interactions in a more intimate setting. Content Marketing World is known for its outstanding speakers, but the real treat is the VIP experience where guests enjoy one-of-a-kind speaker interactions with people like Mark Hamill. Not only do they get information that has never before been presented by the speaker, they get to experience it in a much smaller group, offering everyone a chance to have their questions and comments addressed.

Tiered Attendance Levels: One of the best events I ever attended was a sales conference called Outbound  hosted by Jeb Blount, Anthony Iannarino, and Mark Hunter.  It was  back in 2019 and I even wrote a LinkedIn article about it called, It’s All My Fault, which you can find here. What I loved about this event was how smart they were about attendance and getting people to not only PAY more but also how they used onsite FOMO to drive upgrades and attendance commitment for the following year - including payment - onsite. 

Three attendance tiers were offered starting at $ 300 and ending at $2,750 (don’t quote me on the exact dollar amount but it was in that range.) The lowest tier gave you access to the general conference and conference networking. The mid-tier provided access to workshops. The top tier, the bomb of all tiers, took this 10X further. And of course, that’s the one I paid for.

The top tier offered me access to:

• A special all day event before the general kickoff of the conference at the Porsche Driving Center in Atlanta. The sessions were very collaborative and I not only was able to participate among other attendees, I made some nice professional friends that I would engage with through the rest of the conference. 
• I skipped the line to collect my special badge
• My swag was 10X better than everyone else’s and I still use some of it today
• I had a reserved seat in the front of the room in general session with special tablecloths and water bottles
• Meals and networking also took place in designated areas.

What made the FOMO so powerful is that this VIP treatment was visible to everyone and you could hear, “how do I get in?” To add some pretty flowers to this already delicious cake, here I am today, still raving about it. When that event resurfaces in 2024, I will definitely be going.

Given that hybrid and virtual events are here to stay, the same philosophy about VIP experiences  applies to them too.  After an online event, how about offering an extended session with a prominent speaker to marquis sponsors? Doing so can present new sponsorship opportunities and be part of premium packages.

Premium Digital Experiences 

Companies that offer tiered subscription or memberships can also squeeze more revenue from their offerings.

For example, Business insider offers a higher priced subscription that is ad-free. In the B2C world, Tinder is developing an exclusive new dating subscription service that will cost $500 a month, or $6,000 a year, according to Fast Company.  The working name is called Tinder Vault, which is being planned as “amplification” of Tinder’s current technology, rather than a completely new segment.

There are many other ways to gain pricing power, and I am happy to brainstorm if you want to share 30 minutes with me over a call.

‍The Bottom Line…

Companies that invest in understanding the intricacies of power pricing deliver the right value to the right customers. They know how to leverage existing assets to drive that value and how to ensure execution and delivery. 

They tend to have higher customer satisfaction, loyalty, and long-term profitability, ultimately setting them apart from competitors who adhere to traditional cost-based pricing strategies.

Most key strategies to increase pricing power are data-driven. Leaders in the Media, Information and Events industry are responsible for creating value by monetizing data.  To gain pricing power effectively, you need to know the costs, risks and benefits. However, most platforms do not empower you to do it well. 

Want to increase your pricing power?

Our platform, Insightify, is purpose built to uncover insights that can inform pricing decisions and more.

Our Product Innovation solutions will help you extract more value from current operations while planning for the future. 

Look out for other topics we are covering in this series. 

• Reducing Customer Churn
• Increase Win Rates

Upcoming topics:

• Managing Discounting and Value-Add
• Increasing Expansion and Cross-Sell 
• Identifying and Eliminating Revenue Leakage
• Tightening up Sales Cycles
• Aligning Revenue Critical Teams
• Developing Leading KPIs for Growth
• Using Predictive Analytics to Control the Business

Sarasota, Florida: H2K Partners today announces a new brand, introduces its new SaaS product, and a partnership with InsightOut.

‍

H2K Labs will be the new flagship brand focusing on accelerating profitable revenue growth for media, event, and digital information businesses. The focus will lean on the industry experience of the leadership team to help these businesses use data to create lasting value for their company and drive growth on the bottom line. 

‍

“When revenue growth is efficient, profitable, and scalable, businesses benefit from adding more percentage points to the profit line. However, data complexities in these industries prevent process improvement, deep customer understanding, risk mitigation,  value creation, forecasting accuracy, and ultimately hurt your EBITDA (and valuation),”  says Heather Holst-Knudsen, CEO at H2K Labs.

‍

The company also introduced Insightify, the first SaaS data solution purpose built for the media, event, and digital information industries. Unlike other platforms, Insightify was built specifically to help leaders in the industry  reduce churn, gain pricing power, identify and manage risks, increase forecasting accuracy and more with predictive analytics.

‍

 “Having been an operator myself in the industries we serve, I know very well the pain our customers face when managing revenue data and trying to improve processes and find efficiencies. I am also acutely aware of the challenges our customers face when buying technology, many times having to spend hundreds of  thousands of dollars and 9+ months customizing only to be somewhat satisfied with the outcome upon launch. Our goal with the combination of focused advisory and Insightify is to accelerate profitable and scalable revenue growth, increase speed to value, and ensure user adoption and ROI,” says Heather Holst-Knudsen, CEO at H2K Labs.

‍

To develop Insightify, H2K Labs partnered with InsightOut, a data management & analytics solution that fully integrates with modern workflows to empower business users to solve their acute data problems. InsightOut was chosen as the platform offering due to its variety of core features, ease of use for business professionals, and speed to market. This partnership expands H2K Labs' capabilities to accelerate revenue for companies in the industry with a cutting edge, proven platform used by Bain Capital, Sentrics and many other leading organizations. 

‍

“Partnering with H2K allows us to accelerate our mission of enabling organizations to realize the full potential of data in a very specific, actionable ways. With H2K Labs extremely deep industry knowledge within the media, events and digital information space combined with InsightOut's technology, they are able to deliver industry leading analytics at an incredibly fast pace. We are extremely excited about this partnership and what we are bringing to this underserved market,” says Chad Rose, CEO at InsightOut.

‍

H2K clients now have access to a broader suite of solutions: 

‍

The benefits for our customers include: 

‍

• Advisory services: H2K Labs can help you develop a sound data strategy, identify meaningful ways to accelerate revenue growth, and  identify areas for product innovation using data and audience monetization.
• Insightify: A proven, AI powered SaaS data management and revenue intelligence solution that helps revenue leaders identify opportunities to grow their top and bottom line, avoid risks, and use predictive forecasting to deliver create sustainable value.

‍

About H2K Partners: H2K Partners empowers media, events, and digital information companies to thrive in a rapidly evolving market. With over 30 years of experience, we understand the challenges faced by businesses in these sectors and have developed a data-first approach to help overcome them. Using a blend of AI-powered revenue intelligence, analytics and visualization and real-world expertise, we unlock new opportunities for growth, scalability, and future-proofing revenues. Our team of experts works closely with revenue, finance, marketing, and product leaders to design winning data strategies, modernize revenue operations, and identify high-growth monetization opportunities.

‍

About InsightOut, by Treehouse Technology Group: InsightOut is a unified data analytics platform from Treehouse Technology Group that enables business teams to unlock the power of their data. Business users can extract insights and value from their data at scale, with self-service simplicity. Our end-to-end data solution aggregates, cleans, and blends fragmented data across departments — no matter the data source or volume — within a visual command center. With purpose-built dashboards and intuitive visualizations, users have a 360° view of the business and can independently manage and analyze data at the speed of thought, without reliance on IT. Our valued customers include Envision Healthcare, Dick’s Sporting Goods, Fidelity, Teleflex, Bain Capital, Sentrics, and more.

‍

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:

April 24, 2023
Steven Carlisle
H2K Partners
‪(442) 274-0556
‬marketing@h2klabs.com

‍

I regularly speak with the CEOs of Media and Event companies about their pain points with revenue growth. Inevitably, quota attainment, forecasting, and managing revenue waterfall come up. The wild world of revenue data strategy is even harder when you have to navigate a labyrinth of acquisitions, diverse brand portfolios, and enterprise-wide data asset roadblocks.

Here are some observations about the challenges and steps to overcome them.

‍

1. Embrace CRM Compliance.  Let's eradicate CRM sandbagging once and for all. Encourage your sales team to enter all deals, not just the ones they deem "likely to close."  This will prevent valuable data from slipping through the cracks and paves the way for more accurate forecasting. Fundamentals like this also forge an easier path for predictive analytics – anticipating revenue risks and opportunities and acting on them proactively. In order to do that, however, you need to follow the Golden Rule of Data: what you put in is what you get out.  

• Tip 1: Stop CRM sandbagging by utilizing CRM compliance scorecards that are visible to everyone. 
• Tip 2: Use a revenue intelligence platform that can pick up deal conversation clues in email and map to customers in the CRM. Emails that include words such as “proposal,” “pricing,” “discount,” and names of products you are selling can raise alerts when the customer recipient of those emails does not have a corresponding deal in the CRM.
• Tip 3: Create pipelines for inbound leads and renewals. When inbound leads are generated by marketing, a “lead opportunity” can be created and go through lead stages including Qualified, Intent, Pitch Call Scheduled, Pitch Call Conducted, and if the prospect converts into a sales opportunity it moves into the sales pipeline. 

‍

2. Look Beyond the CRM. When most leaders think about “revenue data”, CRM comes to mind, but leading indicators that truly move businesses forward also come from other data sources. When aggregating data across the enterprise, expand your data sources to include customer emails, conversational intelligence, audience engagement, input from customer success teams, and product performance. By leveraging this data, you can move towards the 3Ps of forecasting: Precise, Predictive, and Prescriptive.

• Tip 1: Understand what’s possible with predictive analytics given advances in technology platforms that unify data across silos and turn it into fuel for decision making. We’ll be happy to share possibilities with Insightify, our own platform, which was built specifically for senior leaders at business information, media and event companies.
• Tip 2: Make “what happens outside the CRM" a big priority for data capture across your organization, since it will be increasingly important in predictive analytics and more accurate forecasting going forward.
• Tip 3: Identify potential sources for insights and decisions, and where the underlying data lives. Consider insights on account risks and opportunities, gaining pricing power, improving product performance and more. Setting up a strong foundation won’t happen unless you identify which specific data sources matter.

‍

3. Ditch Excel and Level Up.  Excel is a time-wasting vortex that is holding back your organization. Hours, days, and weeks are spent pulling data from it, and much of this work consists of one-off efforts to chase down data for lagging indicators. What’s worse, it doesn’t add value to the enterprise or scale well. There are alternatives to break free from Excel…more efficient, scalable solutions to manage your data across the enterprise and empower your teams to add more value (with surprisingly fast ramp up times). If you’re at a private equity backed company, pay particular attention because value creation drives the PE world.

• Tip 1: Do an audit of your organization’s current practices with Excel and quantify the time spent, and how much of it is wasted. Then put it into dollar terms.
• Tip 2: Beyond Excel, think broadly about how much time and money is spent chasing data from disparate sources.
• Tip 3: Explore business intelligence solutions that offer quick wins. We’ve all been down the rabbit hole of vendor RFPs, over engineered platforms, and systems that are hard to implement. (At H2K Labs, delivering quick wins with Insightify is part of our deliverables and processes). Consider longer term factors too, such as needs for data visualization, analysis, predictive analytics, alerts, and collaboration. We believe in phased approaches, and delivering fast time to value is part of our DNA. It should be part of yours too, regardless of which vendor you work with.
• Tip 4: Automate manual pulls from Excel and repetitive (or periodic) tasks that can be done more efficiently with tools or scripts, freeing up time for more strategic and valuable work, particularly for senior leaders.

‍

4. Assemble A Revenue Team. In a world where revenue drivers are hidden in marketing data, customer success data, product data, and beyond, think about how to bring your people in these functions together so they have a seat at the revenue table. And give them a voice. Create a cross-functional revenue team, consisting of business development representatives, account executives, customer service managers, account managers, marketers, content creators, audience specialists, and operations experts. This team should work together to achieve unified company-wide revenue goals. That’s when the magic happens: true alignment. What a concept.

The concept of a revenue team is very nascent, but I am seeing some movement with more progressive revenue leaders.

• Tip 1: Start Small. Transforming a traditional “sales floor” environment into a high performing revenue team has big implications on people, skills, processes, platforms, and culture. Find an easy win that allows revenue critical teams to work together and collaborate without rocking the boat. Once that proves successful, keep evolving and scaling.
• Tip 2: Align KPIs and Incentives. Every function in the organization that impacts revenue (whether it is marketing, sales, customer success, product, or operations) should have an incentive and rewards system tied to some element of the revenue chain. An easy one is tying customer success to renewal rates as well as number of expansion leads generated that result in closed/won deals.

5. Recognize that Revenue Data Requires Strategy.  Most information and event companies have made major investments in audience data: the lifeblood of the business. But more leaders are starting to connect the dots with a broader view of business drivers from their data, and how they tie together.  A solid revenue data strategy can improve pricing, reduce “rogue discounting” of sales teams, understand audience value and ROI, and understand the profitability of products, customers, contracts, and sales representatives.

• ‍Tip 1: Articulate your goals clearly, including what decisions you want to make in an ideal world, before you begin any processes to unify data.‍
• Tip 2: Identify the blockers. What’s getting in the way? Silos? Tools? Processes?‍
• Tip 3: Make enterprise data strategy, broadly conceived, a strategic initiative for revenue growth. Leadership starts from the top.‍
• Tip 4: Establish a data governance framework. Define data ownership, roles, and responsibilities to ensure data quality, consistency, and compliance across the organization.

Enterprise data strategy has caught the attention of leaders, particularly CFOs. A true data-fueled revenue strategy can improve customer acquisition, retention, expansion, pricing, and unit-level profitability. Not to mention fewer surprises with forecasts. When that happens, your investors will thank you.

Bottom line, these five steps are fundamental to unlocking the true power of data-driven revenue growth. We’re here to help, no matter where you are in the journey.

Picture a scenario where you're trying to generate an accurate forecast for your CFO, CEO, and board. Imagine coordinating across multiple divisions, utilizing countless spreadsheets, and investing hundreds of hours from your senior team members. The process is exhausting, frustrating, and ineffective. This situation is unfortunately all too common, and we need to address it.

And unfortunately, once all that time is spent generating a forecast that only looks back, it is no longer a forecast; it’s a “backcast.” It’s truly dead on arrival.

‍

The True Costs

‍

When considering the costs to generate a forecast that is dead on arrival, it gets worse.

Let's consider an average organization with ten divisions. If each division requires 100 hours per month to generate a forecast, at an average rate of $80 per hour, that's a whopping $960,000 spent annually.

And what's the outcome of this massive annual investment? You're left with forecasts that are dead on arrival, missed quotas, unhappy board members, a lack of confidence in leadership, and reduced company valuation.

But there's a solution to this challenging problem. The key is to make data the heart of your revenue center of excellence. The journey to this state of revenue enlightenment may seem daunting, but it's achievable with the right framework.

‍

Defining Forecasting

‍

Before the power of data could be harnessed, forecasting was defined as a method of making informed predictions by using historical data to determine future trends.

With the ability to harness data, train machine learning models, and use AI to forecast upcoming events, forecasting now involves a combination of historical data and real-time changes and trends. Salesperson behavior, customer service behavior, pipeline traction, post-sale engagement, customer behavior, product performance, finance data, and macroeconomic trends all play a crucial role in making accurate predictions.

By integrating these factors, forecasting becomes a robust and reliable tool. It not only predicts future outcomes but also uncovers root causes and provides prescriptive insights to address them effectively.

This approach minimizes risk and empowers data-driven decisions to grow more substantially . It enhances the quality and efficacy of the forecasting process and has a direct impact on the top line.

‍

Say Hello to Predictive Forecasting.

‍

Why Predictive Forecasting is Critical to Your Growth

‍

The world has changed. Customer behaviors have changed. Employee behaviors have changed. What you sell has changed or will be changing. What worked a few months ago is no longer working today. We also have two years of complete abnormality. Using Same Time Last Year and historical data is simply not viable and is getting revenue organizations into trouble. 

And frankly, when faced with uncertain economic conditions, not having an accurate forward-looking view into your revenue future could be a mistake hard to overcome. 

Predictive forecasting impacts the board, the CEO, CRO, COO, CRO, CMO, and functional heads. It affects revenue teams and individual sellers. It’s critical that predictive forecasting is put at the top of the strategy agenda.

‍

Where to Start

‍

My first piece of advice is to understand two things:

1. Your current data strategy, architecture, and process
2. Your current state of “revenue excellence” or lack thereof

Once that is established, knowing where to start is easy, and we have developed a framework to help you along the journey.

‍

The Revenue Room™ Framework

‍

The Revenue Room™ Framework serves as the guiding North Star that encompasses predictive forecasting and simplifies the transition from outdated, ineffective forecasting practices to highly effective predictive forecasting. The four phases of the journey include standardizing and governing revenue functions, reviewing and consolidating data and platforms, and, ultimately, modernizing products. Let's break it down:

‍Phase One: Standardization & Governance

The first step is to standardize processes and develop governance across your revenue functions. This involves streamlining your sales processes, standardizing your pipeline stages, and establishing common terminology across divisions. You'll also need to ensure that everyone is using the same CRM and sales tech stack and that you're all measuring success using the same KPIs.

Phase Two: Data & Platforms

Next, you need to review your systems and the data flowing through them. This involves strategizing and governing data, managing and analyzing it, and improving data visualization and reporting. It's crucial to consolidate your data platforms, democratize access to them, and improve your team's data literacy and skills.

Phase Three: Revenue as a Center of Excellence

Now, with standards, governance, and a data and platform strategy in place, you're ready to activate data analytics to drive revenue excellence. This means aligning your organization, establishing revenue operations, implementing measurements and insights, and identifying risks and opportunities.. It also means your revenue teams can use leading indicators to improve quota performance, identify deal risk and, immediately activate “deal storming” activities, get alerts to as well as customer expansion opportunities. Revenue-critical teams can collaborate, making winning a team sport.

Phase Four: Product Modernization

Finally, as your revenue organization gains momentum and your understanding of customer demands increases, your product team can collaborate with your revenue, marketing, and operations teams to improve product performance and innovate around data. Products can be standardized so data and reporting is meaningful and accessible with a push of a button, unprofitable or loss leaders can be managed or discontinued, and new solutions with high margins and customer value can be optimized.

The Benefits of Predictive and Prescriptive Forecasting

‍

Putting data at the center of your revenue universe allows you to generate predictive and prescriptive forecasts. This approach allows you to avoid 'Category 5' disasters, make your customers, CEOs, CFOs, board members, and investors happier, and increase your company's valuation.

The most significant benefit, however, is the cultural shift that occurs within your organization. You'll notice an increase in data literacy, shared accountability, and decision-making backed by data rather than gut instincts. As a result, your business becomes more customer-centric.

So, what's your take on predictive and prescriptive forecasting and making revenue a center of excellence? Are you ready to implement the recommended framework and steps to get there? Email me with your thoughts.

Improving the likelihood of deals closing is critical to getting more output from your sales team(s). Doing it effectively is one part process and one part technology…and data is at the center of both.

By fine-tuning your approach and tailoring your communications for each prospect, you can effectively boost your deal conversion rates to grow your revenue. Most importantly, put predictive and prescriptive data analytics powered by AI and machine-learning into the hands of all your revenue-critical employees so you can identify deal risk and opportunities in time to make an impact.

‍
According to our study of over 100 CEOs, CROs and other executives, 8 in 10 companies are not effectively using predictive analytics to mitigate risks with pipeline traction and velocity. 34% of companies are not doing it at all. Ironically, data is one of the biggest assets of all companies who participated in this study: digital information, media and events organizations, in addition to marketing service providers.

If your competitors are using these methods and you’re not, your company is at a disadvantage. The tools exist to make it happen.

Here are some other important considerations to close more deals:

Tip #1: Adopt conversational intelligence tools to understand customer intent and interests at different stages of the sales process. Connect to predictive analytics and dashboards to identify opportunity and risk.

‍
Tip #2: Dissect objections from prospects, and ensure they are well documented for each account in your CRM. Standardize and carefully manage objection responses,  with solid training for your team. Using your data platform, when objections are identified, immediately deal-storm with revenue-critical members of the team to craft the next step of the deal plan. Put metrics in place to measure impact on that deal.

‍
Tip #3: Closely examine wins and losses, and debrief with your sales teams and take action on what’s working and what’s not. Using predictive analytics, create algorithms that identify the potential loss ahead of time to help mitigate and turn into a win.

‍
Tip #4: Personalize communications to each account and, when efficient, every stakeholder. In partnership with marketing and using a unified view of the customer, develop a continuous improvement strategy where prospect and customer communication is constantly tailored using what’s working and getting rid of what’s not.

Want to jumpstart your revenue?

Our Revenue Acceleration solutions will help you extract more value from current operations while planning for the future. We’ll help you get set up to use predictive and prescriptive analytics to identify deal risk before it happens, with our platform, Insightify. We deliver a rapid time to value, with quick wins and a continuous cycle of improvement – a Flywheel effect.

‍

Look out for other topics we are covering in this series.

1. Reducing Customer Churn
2. Improving Pricing Power
3. Managing Discounting and Value-Add
4. Increasing Expansion and Cross-Sell
5. Identifying and Eliminating Revenue Leakage
6. Tightening up Sales Cycles
7. Aligning Revenue Critical Teams
8. Developing Leading KPIs for Growth
9. Using Predictive Analytics to Control the Business

Each topic should be part of your operating plan and will have short and long-term benefits — as long as the words "sustainable and scalable growth" are embedded into the discussion.

If you are a CEO, CFO, CRO, or other senior-level executive leading a media, events, and digital information business, you are wrestling with how to meet company goals in an uncertain economic climate alongside a rapidly changing business landscape. 

Inflation, market downturn, increasing pressure to transform and evolve business models, growing a team amid talent shortages, and ensuring operational efficiency and effectiveness are all hot topics on the leadership team's agenda.

Even sales behemoths like Salesforce are facing new economic realities where top-line growth is no longer enough. Marc Benioff is now focused on delivering and excelling at delivering "profitable, efficient growth" in response to pressure from activist investors.

In this series, we'll explore recession-proof strategies that will help you maximize profits while reducing risks. No one likes surprises in the boardroom, and we’re here to help you avoid them, no matter what the economic environment. Each strategy should be part of your operating plan and will have short and long-term benefits — as long as the words "sustainable and scalable" are embedded into the discussion.

10 topics we will cover in this series:

1. Reducing Customer Churn
2. Improving Pricing Power
3. Managing Discounting and Value-Add
4. Increasing Win Rates
5. Increasing Expansion and Cross-Sell 
6. Identifying and Eliminating Revenue Leakage
7. Tightening up Sales Cycles
8. Aligning Revenue Critical Teams
9. Developing Leading KPIs for Growth
10. Using Predictive Analytics to Control the Business

How to Make Customer Retention a Strategic Imperative

Retention is one of the most significant bell-weathers of business health and value creation. While some customer loss is inevitable due to budget cuts, employee turnover, and acquisitions, high levels of churn are clear indicators of possible issues. Customer churn wreaks havoc on the business and costs substantially more than just the lost revenue. The consequences of churn:

• Puts pressure on the marketing, business development, and sales teams to replace the revenue and sets them back from hitting quota
• Distracts customer success teams from focusing on the retainable accounts by trying to come up with a desperate last-minute salvage plan
• Adds unnecessary workload to advertising, event, and/or lead generation operations as they scramble to save the account with the new salvage measures
• Turns a customer into a negative referral and can hurt your brand
• And in some organizations, causes finger-pointing and blame and a toxic, unproductive working environment

Causes of Churn & How to Mitigate Before It's too Late

Everyone hates churn, but in our business, let's be honest, some of it is inevitable. In addition, media, events, and digital information organizations suffer from being the first on the chopping block when the economy turns sour and marketing budgets get cut.

I like to break causes of churn into 3 categories:

‍

‍

I don't know about you, but I like to spend my time focusing on things I can control, which means I am going to focus on Controllable and Our Own Dang Fault columns.

Controlling churn and retention outcomes is tied to a few common threads:
Predictive Data & Analytics > Preemptive Action > Measurement and Accountability > Revenue-Critical Functional Alignment > Leadership & Skills

You should measure your closed/lost deals on the retention side this way. Why? Because knowing what percent falls into what's controllable and what’s not will be very revealing and could give you a clear sense of what you could add to the bottom line if you improved those outcomes.

PS: Don't forget, it's not just enough to retain the logo, you need to also retain and grow the revenue.

Actionable Tips

I could spend days and weeks talking about how to fix customer churn and boost retention. High levels of customer retention not only indicate robust business health, it also is an indicator that the business is able to support the development of new revenue streams.

Here are some proven approaches to boost your customer retention.

Tip #1: Identify the root causes and leading indicators of customer churn. Sometimes these are intuitive but just not very visible due to lack of real-time data transparency. Outside of the things you cannot control, the usual suspects include underperforming products or contracts, price sensitivity, the level of customer service, and ongoing sales engagement.

‍Tip #2: Create a Retention Working Group. Define retention broadly, assemble a cross functional team with people at different levels of your organization and give them a clear mandate. Areas to focus on can include:

• Customer experience
• Demonstrating customer value
• Upsell, cross-sell and expansion
• Increasing average contract value
• Identifying and responding to unmet customer needs

Tip #3: Using predictive analytics and , connect contract performance data with your renewal, upsell and expansion pipeline. When contract obligations are not being met (whether it is quantity and quality of impressions, leads, meetings, and other curated engagements) your team will get alerts to take action.

Tip #4: Create metrics and compensation incentives for all revenue critical teams tied to retention and account expansion.

• In addition to quota, include retention and expansion KPIs that result in variable compensation.
• For customer success teams, include bonuses tied to KPIs such as retention, expansion rates, and qualified expansion and upsell leads generated by the CSM team.
• Measure and evaluate operations teams on customer delivery and satisfaction scores.

Tip #5: Hire and train a ninja Customer Success Team. Customer Success is not to be confused with Customer Service which is really a subset of Customer Success. Develop customer journey plans that include onboarding, training, ongoing  value creation and upsell/cross-sell action plans.

Tip #6: Measure, measure, and measure again. Using data analytics, benchmarking and scorecards, track what’s working and what’s not. Iterate and pivot and share best practices across your organization: all brand portfolios and regions. Break out and roll-up results in meaningful ways, e.g. by division, brand, channel and sector etc.

In this economy in particular, reducing customer churn is critical. It is the number one concern among C-suite executives surveyed in our study, 2023 Data-Driven Revenue Growth in the Media, Digital Information and Events Industry. The report from our study will be available in May, request a copy here.

Do you need to improve retention and reduce churn? Request a meeting with me today.