Now we turn our focus to the Revenue Engine of a business. Selling, or revenue generation, is an exercise of engineering. It can include component pieces: the quality of the product being sold, the ability of the sales team, the technology that is used to communicate with prospective customers, the reliability of the service team, etc. What is critical is how well these pieces are linked together and how efficiently they interoperate. Your revenue engine consumes people and resources and produces customers and capital for your business. The less waste heat and the more efficiently this conversion occurs the more successful your business is.

What are the principles of good engineering for a Revenue Engine?

In last week’s post we explained that iteration is a key piece. Today we break it out more granularly so you can apply it to your construction and engineering.

Each of these are articles in themselves and we may return to them in the future, but in the meantime, we want to leave you with some practical steps to improve your own revenue engine.

Instant Connectivity — when someone wants something from you, the faster you connect them to it, the more likely you are to gain them as a customer. Preferences change over time and leads decay. Competitors are available to potential customers as well. Measure how long it takes your customer to reach someone who can help them. Measure how long it takes to actually get them what they want. Regardless of what you call this set of metrics, you want the time it takes to connect your customers with what they want to approach zero.

Transparency in Performance — it’s hard to improve your engine if you don’t know how the component parts are performing. Consider a simple model that turns fuel into power, and power into motion. You need to know how well the fuel-into-power conversion works and how the power-into-motion transformation occurs. How your sales talent and your communication systems perform is no different. It is critical that you have an organizational philosophy that wants to understand the reality of each component and how it is performing. Then you need to openly discuss how that performance can be improved.

Accountability to Results — when an engine fails it’s critical to know what part caused the failure and why that part failed. Was it faulty manufacturing? Was it a bad design? Was the part not serviced properly? It isn’t helpful to say the engine failed if you want to improve and avoid disasters. You have to identify the part and the process that failed and change it. A revenue engine is no different.

Logic Behind Decisions and the Ability to Disagree — as you make changes to your revenue engine it’s critical to explain why those changes are being made and present that logic to the organization. Why decisions are made is as important (or more important) than the actual decisions. This enables the organization to understand the narrative of its evolution and the reasons behind changes — it also helps you adjust quickly if certain assumptions are no longer true. To ensure this logic is best-in-class, it’s important for those who operate your engine or connect to it to be able to question those decisions and disagree.

We’ve started to include answers to questions from our readers within our content and shape our content by feedback.

You can read our past articles here: https://medium.com/@FlightSystems