Ephor Group is a Management Advisory firm that provides Useful Capital and Management Science to create wealth producing enterprises.

Go-To-Market Revenue Growth Principles & Practices.

 

The following principles and best practices are based on our lessons learned having invested in and consulted hundreds of companies.

 

There are three expansion strategies for growth:

  1. Perform more efficiently and effectively (i.e. Portfolio Optimization).

  2. Expansion into new products/solutions, markets/segments/geographies, through Alternative Distribution.

  3. Acquisition.

Unless your current portfolio offering is optimized (you are #1 or #2 for each of your targeted segments) focus should be on your core business. When evaluating growth and expansion options, prudent leaders reduce risks (mitigate growth risks) before making any significant investment or action. When revenue best practices are used and risks removed, value is increased by leveraging surefire revenue campaign tactics and today's most effective marketing tools.


Ephor Group Principles & Revenue Best Practices:

 

 

Beating the Odds: How to Effectively Mitigate Risk

 

Revenue Assets

Companies that develop and invest in their revenue assets increase their effectiveness of programs and personal, insure higher probabilities of success and create value long-term shareholder value.The benefits of revenue assets include:

  1. Improve marketing spend ROI by decreasing sales costs
  2. Increase the probability of success and the effectiveness of sales personnel.
  3. Reduce long-term lead generation costs
  4. Improve conversion rates
  5. Supports and enables segmentation, personalization, vertical targeting
  6. Reduces sales cycle time
  7. Enables partnerships, referrals, opportunity areas for new expansion (product or geographic) 
  8. Changes marketing from a cost function to a profit driver (i.e. marketing becomes balance sheet assets that are attractive to strategic buyers and financial investors and increase valuations

The business case for creating assets is as simple as A,B, and C:

  • Set yourself and your team up for success with brand assets that promote and distinguish you in the marketplace
  • Leverage marketing assets to never put a sales agent in a low probability situation. 
  • Use sales assets increase key relationships, drive closes, improve conversion rates and reduce sales cycle.

Getting Started: How-To Create Assets

Creating assets starts like any business improvement project, by taking an inventory of the current assets and creating a gap or SWOT analysis.
#1. First, take an inventory of your current brand, marketing, and sales assets. An asset is anything which can be used over and over without using it up. In fact, it's something that gets better the more you invest and develop the asset. Marketing assets are things that you invest in once, that will then keep attracting clients over the long term. Assets include:

    • Win-Loss research studies
    • Testimonials from Raving Fans
    • Starter Offers, Trial Offers, Assessments, Online Tools, ROI & TCO Calculators
    • Signed Partnership Agreements
    • Salesforce automation processes and workflows
    • Relationships with media, analysts, thought leaders, bloggers, writers, etc.
    • Opt-in email databases
    • Marketing research studies, findings, reports
    • Marketing automation processes and workflows.
    • Market Intelligence Research
    • Lead Generation Online Web P portals (landing pages with stunning CTA)
    • House List (Mail and Email Database of contacts and prospects)
    • Content: Videos, Articles, Reports, Presentations, etc
    • Competitive Intelligence Research
    • Case studies
    • Brand Standards

 

#2. To create assets, think like an owner in terms of creating long-term valuations in order to create long-term assets.  For example: What is the single asset your business needs most today?

  • If you have Raving Fans then create video and blog posts with testimonials or case studies. Next, publish, promote and repeat.
  • If you need Raving Fans then focus on creating:
    • Relationships with highly influential people that work with the targets you want to work with (i.e. people who, once you earn their trust, can introduce you to clients again and again) What steps should you take today to get to know them better? 
    • Build a following of dedicated fans. Use email marketing and a blog of followers here and distribute really high quality content that promotes your industry and domain expertise.
    • Create evergreen research content that positions you as an industry and domain expert .  What could you spend a few hours creating this weekend, that could highlight your expertise?

Revenue Tactics

Revenue Tools: GoToMarket Marketing Tools

 

Marketing Assets

Read more about Marketing Assets.

 

About Ephor's Market Research Intelligence

Strategy is the intersection of a desired future state and the action(s) designed to achieve the particular goal.


Strategy relies on wisdom, management science, effective forecasting and planning, i.e. “being able to see around the corner” and the efficient marshalling of resources. How a company grows is a matter of both strategy and tactical execution, but certainly an effective strategy reduces risk, ensures more efficient use of capital and resources, and promises greater rewards. Strategy will rarely be successful without testing and validation.


Ephor’s Market Research Intelligence (MRI) delivers strategy validation. And our approach concludes with insourcing the market research intelligence programs so that they become institutionalized internally to our client companies. Results of MRI Routines include adding significant value to your strategy as well as creating revenue and marketing assets along the way.

Download our brief: Market Research Intelligence.

 

Beating the Odds When You Expand

Did you know that 2/3 of expansion plans are abandoned within six months and 85% of expansion plans fail to achieve ROI within the first two years?

Effective managers aren’t cowboys; they are methodical managers of risk. At every turn prudent managers reduce risk before making any significant investment or action.

 

 

Portfolio Expansion & Portfolio Optimization

Which of the following is your strategy to achieving improved profitability?

  • Improve margins (pricing and/or efficiency)
  • Improve productivity ("rate x Q")
  • Improve your portfolio: add additional products, services, solutions, items to resell, partner

Only the most efficient and most resilient business models create wealth. To protect your business the majority of the following measures are required:

  1. Identify a Profitable Niche. Be #1 or #2 in each market or change. Only sell and deliver a value-proposition that the market will position you as the #1 or #2. There is no wealth or sustainability if you are third or below in your market.
    Repetition increases marketing response rates and effectiveness. We recommend that marketing connect with your target audience at least eight times per quarter with distinct, relevant and compelling impressions.
  2. Attract, Retain, and Grow Customers. Step one is of course creating "Raving Fans" that most need your core value-proposition. Step two is to decide your revenue growth options. Do you want to expand into new markets, expand your portfolio, or acquire alternatives, partners, and/or competitors?
  3. Invest in Your Assets. Assets create leverage, scale and profitability. Improve your product portfolio and marketing and customer assets. Build strong bonds with clients through recurring revenue model, portfolio management, customer lifecycle management, and brand equities. Create solutions and programs to ensure the business demonstrates strong ROI to customers and long retention tenure.
    • #3b. Develop your Human Capital Assets so that "B Players" perform at "A Levels" and jettison all "C and F Players."
      Success in this economy will be a direct result of increased skill and effectiveness of your entire executive team. Businesses must remove people dependency to create scalability while simultaneously investing in your people to increase the probability of success.
      While this uncertainty poses a challenge, significant opportunities do exist for growth through innovation and investment. Nimble businesses that can respond and change to effectively reposition and compete differently and better.

 

Growth through Acquisition: Building the Platform
Outsourced corporate development best practices:
The time is right to acquire capabilities and "books of business" due to the following:

  • Many motivated sellers. The number of baby boomers looking to retire over the next few years is enormous coupled with the number of both investors looking for exits and founders that are tired and looking for a change will result in over a trillion dollars in transactions over the next few years.
  • A well performing business can add significant value to its operations and clients by providing more holistic offering.
  • Many industries are undergoing significant change.
  • New laws and regulations are eliminating niche providers due to rising complexities and costs of doing business.
  • Acquisitions can include but are not limited to add-ons, rollups, commercialization of IP, recapitalization, management buy-outs/buy-ins, and spinouts.

Implementing your strategic vision within the constraints of available capital and resources makes owning and managing a business a real challenge. Today’s operating requirements creates complex challenges to grow. These economic realities place more stress and new constraints on leadership to make the right decisions and adjust their financial models and business dynamics. In this economy, it’s critical that leadership maximize the entire spectrum of opportunities, including those initiatives around M&A and outsourced Corporate Development. By employing specific tactics, processes and best practices that mitigate both investment and execution risks, your business objectives can be achieved.

 

Revenue Analytics via Management Science: Revenue Operations Management Reporting (ROM Reports)

Do you have an effective revenue plan?

 

The answer is “YES” if you can accurately forecast revenues within 5%. 



If not, a revenue plan that that details your revenue sources by distribution channel and asset as well as encompasses the programs, routines, and required campaigns required to grow is essential.  Revenue success comes from the intersection of strategy and execution and an effective revenue plan is often the first step towards achieving your revenue goals. 


Traditional sales planning relies on the fact that “new clients will resemble the old clients”; while this approach in prosperous times has some merit it possibly leaves out the significant potential of expansion and inserts the risk of marketplace changes.

 

Benefits of our approach to revenue planning, which we connect to execution through ongoing routine reporting is called: Revenue Operations Management (ROM Reporting) and is a part of our overall operational reporting which we refer to as Management Science. The benefits of having ROM Reporting which routinely monitors and reports includes the following:

  • Validate new products and solutions in an economically efficient manner
  • Validate pricing: map price demand curves
  • Validate messaging by buyer type: what resonates and causes the decision to act
  • Assess brand rank, promise, attributes to better understand your obstacles

 

To conclude: ROM Reporting (Revenue Operations Management) is part of Management Science and enables executives to avoid “Trial and Error Management.” Assets created by the revenue portion of Management Science include:

    • Ongoing system and infrastructure for Market Intelligence.
    • A Pipeline of opportunities, nurtured prospects, and partners.
    • Database Integrity; leverage your greatest asset.
    • Marketing Optimization: ensure your marketing and sales spend is efficient, optimize campaigns to maximize response, and maximize your brand awareness programs. 

     

    Our Management Science delivers strategy validation.  The Ephor approach concludes with insourcing the Management Science programs such that they become internally institutionalized to our client companies.   Ephor’s Management Science is designed to validate your strategy through a pragmatic and research based program which simultaneously gathers real-world data, scores responses into probability segments and provides the information thru valuable, publishable industry research reports, which can be used for additional promotional and opportunity generation initiatives. The revenue benefits of Management Science include:

    1. Systematically profile your target market in order to identify those companies that match your qualification criteria and rank them as “A”, “B” or “C” leads.
    2. Produces assets for continual use in its ongoing efforts (pipeline of prospects, promotional materials).
    3. Better understand what drives your buyer segments including their demographic, psychographics, buyergraphic, and infographics profiles.
    4. Determine what price are they willing to pay?
    5. Determine what needs/priorities are unsatisfied?

    Implementing strategic vision within the constraints of available resources is a real challenge. Today’s operating requirements creates complex challenges to grow. It’s critical that leadership maximize the entire spectrum of opportunities. By employing specific B2B best practice revenue tactics that have proven outcomes, your business objectives can be achieved.

    Contact us at ephor[at]ephorgroup.com for a complimentary list of revenue, GoToMarket, sales support tools or corporate development tools customized for your industry. 

     

    Contact Ephor Group @
    713.977.3600
    ephor[at]ephorgroup.com
    Chairman: Garry E. Meier


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