We’re back…
This is part one of a series I’m doing about our company relaunch and some thoughts about how to help your company to move beyond revenue to true customer success. If you have been following this blog, you have probably noticed that we have been dark for a while. Ok. To be completely honest, it has been about two years. Well, I’m pleased to tell that we’re back and we are better than before.
There are a lot of twists and turns in the Beyond Revenue story that I won’t share with you right now. However, I will say that we suddenly lost our business partner and long-time friend, Doug Berry, last June. Doug was a caring friend and a talented business professional. He is sorely missed.
Obviously with any change in partner structure, Rick and I were faced with a decision…keep going or shut it down. What we decided to do was go back to our roots. With almost 50 years of enterprise software experience between us, we decided it was time to rethink Beyond Revenue as a consultancy and reimagine it as a software company.
Moving beyond revenue…
From the beginning, our goal at Beyond Revenue was to help companies solve revenue problems. We routinely see companies who are so focused on making new sales that they neglect other key areas of the business. And, why not? Revenue is the lifeblood of the business, right?
I would suggest that the answer is “no”. Instead, I would suggest that happy customers are the lifeblood of business…not revenue. We’ve seen many examples of companies who do a great job marketing and selling products but are still losing money because they are producing terrible products that their customers end up resenting. And, we’ve seen the opposite scenario where a company has great products that are loved by their customers but they are doing a poor job getting the message out about those great products.
When faced with these types of problems, many companies have a knee jerk reaction.
- Replace key executives and find a “new vision”.
- Layoff workers to save money.
- Start a new marketing campaign to tout a new “change in direction or attitude”.
What we rarely see is a commitment to analyzing and improving business processes using facts not feel. In fact, most process improvement initiatives are relegated to the IT department where they become technology evaluation projects instead of continuous quality improvement projects that involve the entire organization.
Our goal is to help companies solve real business problems starting with sales and marketing. By doing so, we think we can help companies move beyond revenue by creating a customer focused culture that attracts, retains, and delights customers.
In part two, we will talk about a different approach to using technology to improve sales and marketing processes. Look for that post on Tuesday, 5/28/2013.
