The Revenue Room™ - The Journey to Revenue Excellence

# revenue

Transforming Mid-Market B2B Revenue Models Through Data, Strategy, and Continuous Improvement

Heather Holst-Knudsen

The Imperative of Data-Driven Revenue Growth

In an environment marked by inflation, achieving revenue growth has become a top priority for companies. However, to ensure lasting impact, businesses must focus on retaining and growing their existing customer base, emphasizing high-quality revenue, and investing in capability building across all revenue-critical functions. This requires adopting an approach where capabilities build upon each other, gaining strength over time.

The Compelling Financial Returns of Data-Driven Selling

The transition to data-driven selling is not just a trend but a necessity. According to the Gartner Future of Sales 2025 Report, 60% of B2B sales organizations will shift from intuition-based to data-driven selling by 2025. This shift promises substantial financial returns, as evidenced by data from Boston Consulting Group. Companies with data-driven revenue organizations can expect a 10–20% increase in sales productivity, a 15–20% increase in customer satisfaction, a 30% reduction in GTM expenses, 19% faster growth, 15% more profits. Data from Forrester Consulting shows that public companies enjoy 71% improvement in stock performance.

Revenue Driven Data

The Urgency of Revenue Modernization in a Changing World

Several factors underscore the imperative for modernization in the revenue organization. As the business landscape continues to evolve at a rapid pace, new and previously unknown competitors continuously emerge, and radical changes reshape your customer’s preferences and the way they consume information and purchase. Economic challenges and evolving customer demands further intensify the pressure felt by businesses while investors and boards increasingly demand results.

Data assumes a crucial role, transcending its status as a mere tool and becoming a pivotal driver of operational efficiency, margin improvement, value creation, revenue generation, and competitive advantage.

‍

Recognizing the Signs for Modernizing Your Revenue Organization

There are clear metrics you can track to see if your revenue organization requires modernization. Some easy ones to monitor include consistently missed forecasts (especially those presented to the board), decreasing quota attainment levels, increasing churn rates, maverick discounting, decreased net revenue retention, low NPS and CSAT scores, and higher-than-expected attrition rates on the revenue team.

In addition to the readily noticeable signals, some are more elusive or recognized but deliberately unacknowledged by the business due to the overwhelming magnitude of the anticipated change.

Inefficiency in Data Management: The extensive time, personnel, and effort required to aggregate, cleanse, organize, and analyze data can be daunting and inefficient. This process, though necessary for deriving insights, is often overwhelming and takes valuable time away from strategic activities that could drive the business forward. Reports are inconsistent, unreliable, and incredibly frustrating to employees.

Missed Revenue Opportunities: Often, there's a persistent concern about potential revenue slipping through the cracks due to inadequate data insights. For example, the finance team might struggle to identify the reasons for customer attrition or to effectively track how well a media business is offsetting print decline with digital growth. Understanding lifetime value is also another challenge.

Challenges in Key Data Metrics Extraction: Investors and boards demand more frequent and more complicated data insights such as gross and net revenue retention, ARPC (average revenue per customer), and audience engagement metrics over a rolling 12-month period. Finance teams and/or CROs cannot produce these reports and data quickly and effectively.

About the Author

Heather Holst-Knudsen is a distinguished figure and expert in the events, media, marketing and technology sectors. Using her extensive experience, she guides clients in adapting to structural economic and market changes, seizing the chance to innovate and evolve. She specializes in digital and data disruption and opportunity, exploring how these overarching factors can impact revenue growth, customer-centricity, operational efficiency, profit margins, and the overall valuation of companies in both public and private markets.

Her journey began at her family business, Thomas Publishing Company, where she honed her skills. She further expanded her expertise by holding positions at early industry giants Miller Freeman, Reed Elsevier, and IDG. Returning to Thomas Publishing, Heather founded and spearheaded Manufacturing Enterprise Communications, an integrated media portfolio connecting buyers and sellers in the manufacturing and technology sectors. Starting in 2015 and spanning the next seven years, she leveraged her expertise as a revenue and business leader in various SaaS businesses, including Feathr, Gleanin, Brella and Edflex.

Heather is deeply passionate about digital innovation, data monetization, and AI and how these strategies fuel revenue growth, profitability, and company valuation. To serve and create value for clients in these areas, she launched H2K Labs, dedicated to generating and leveraging value through data for media, business information, events, and adjacent technology and service markets.

Comments (0)

Popular