Trend or Opportunity? This is how Strong Revenue Marketing is Done Correctly!

1. What exactly is Revenue Marketing?
2. What can Revenue Marketing do?
3. What are the advantages of Revenue Marketing?
4. What challenges can Revenue Marketing face?
5. Why is Revenue Marketing becoming more important in 2024?
6. In 5 steps to your Revenue Marketing strategy
7. With which tools does Revenue Marketing work?
8. Conclusion

Have you ever heard of Revenue Marketing? If not, now is the perfect time to learn! This new marketing trend is also gaining momentum in the German-speaking world. Our guest author Maurice Braun believes that Revenue Marketing has the potential to turn B2B marketing upside down. Now you're in on it from the start and can watch as a new trend takes the market by storm. But let's start at the beginning:

What exactly is Revenue Marketing?

Revenue Marketing is a holistic and goal-oriented approach to marketing and sales. It is used by companies to predictably maximize revenue growth. In fact, Revenue Marketing is even part of Lead Generation, but can also be seen as a response to established marketing practices.

Here you can learn more about the approach, what advantages it has for you, and where the idea originally came from. The most important thing follows directly afterwards: How is Revenue Marketing implemented, which tools can help you? Here you will get the most important information about the new trend strategy and why it can be your game changer for 2024!

What can Revenue Marketing do?

By now, everyone is familiar with the terms Lead Generation and Demand Generation. For a long time, they were the standard in B2B marketing worldwide. Today, this is still the case in Germany, but a new trend is coming from the USA: Revenue Marketing!

What is the difference between these three approaches?

Basically, the Lead Generation deals with the Generation of Leads. You align your company, your strategy, and your marketing measures accordingly.

This sounds logical at first: The more leads sign up, the more customers you have, the more revenue you generate. But that doesn't necessarily have to be true. When your measures are aimed only at lead generation and you gather many unqualified leads, you will still only have a fraction of the customers and therefore only a fraction of the desired revenue. A classic CTA would be: 'Sign up now!'

Similar to the Demand Generation. Here all strategies of the company, especially marketing and sales, are set to generate demand. This means that you try to acquire as many customers as possible and create new demand, i.e. new customers.

These two strategies are rather quantitative approaches. Even though Revenue Marketing, i.e., sales marketing, sounds more like a quantitative statement, it is about qualitative features. It is meant to maximize revenue.

The goal is not to generate as many leads or customers as possible, but to hold on to the best customers who pay a lot and stay for a long time. Qualified long-term customers are a key term here. This strategy can actually be applied within Lead Generation, or Demand Generation, and even officially belongs to Lead Generation as a subcategory.

Yet, this is a personalized approach that has already achieved great success, which every one of us knows - from the B2C!

The idea is not as new as you might think. In industries such as aviation, hospitality, or car marketing, Revenue Marketing in the form of dynamic pricing has long been the industry standard. So why is it that marketing is only hearing about it now?

The simple solution: Revenue Marketing is a B2C marketing strategy!

The strategy was first applied to air travel in the 1970s. It's still known today in the form of different fares for seemingly the same seats. Initially, manually controlled early booking discounts were used until the current strategy developed in the mid-70s. It was found that airlines did not have a cost problem, but a revenue problem. They repeatedly flew with planes that were often only half full.

A comprehensive system was developed that is still being continuously developed today. From cheap fare, over early booking discount, to last-minute offers - these ideas all come from Revenue Marketing and aim to maximize revenue.

So how can you translate this from aviation into B2B?

Scientifically speaking, Revenue Marketing is nothing more than the Systemization of algorithmic price formation. But since we want to look at marketing, this perspective is not enough for us. 

Revenue Marketing refers to the holistic process of identifying specific marketing channels that enable revenue growth. Here, sales and marketing measures are to be aligned with the revenue. In this form of marketing, a more comprehensive approach is pursued, in which both your marketing team and your sales team work together to maximize your ROI.

What are the advantages of Revenue Marketing?

Most marketers believe that their measures have a positive impact on the company's revenues. Are you one of them?

Here you can learn how you can expand your revenue influence with the help of Revenue Marketing:

• Revenue Marketing can have a big effect on revenue and, on top of that, optimize the effectiveness of marketing and sales. Every change made to implement revenue marketing, has a direct positive effect on your company and your customers..
• Your marketing and sales teams will work together much better. In this way, marketing measures can perform better and new strategies are easily comparable (and you can impress the CEO with great results that he will understand at first glance).
• The whole company can focus on customer satisfaction. Your customers are interested in your added value, your product, and your customer service - not your organizational chart - this is how you truly optimize your revenue
• Another important KPI is the ROI. With efficient Revenue Marketing, you spend money on campaigns that generate real revenue. This frees up additional budget for optimizing operations. At OMR Reviews, you can compare the Cash Management Tools and find the best one for you.
• Automated marketing mechanism tools work even more smoothly. Frictionless processes and high-quality data are not only easier to evaluate, but also save time. Get your time back, so you can take care of more important things.
• The collected leads will be even more qualified. Your sales team will thank you for this because they will be able to close deals faster and better.
• And last but not least: It's much easier to understand that you contributed to the revenue than it is with most other KPIs. Revenue is tangible and understandable. Anyone who understands what they are working on is more motivated. So Revenue Marketing can also have a positive impact on the motivation of your employees.

As you can see, Revenue Marketing offers you many benefits. However, you can only realize these if you master the implementation. Next, you'll learn about the challenges you may face.

What challenges can Revenue Marketing face?

There are also some challenges in Revenue Marketing that have to be mastered. Although it sounds like a very rigid strategy where you constantly only look at your revenues, it's about much more.

It's about interdependencies between departments and individual people, communication paths, and a permanent overview of the measures to be implemented.

In doing so, you must not forget that you are doing all of this to optimize your revenue.

In doing so, you constantly have your company, your employees, your strategy, and of course your sales in focus. Don't forget that there is also an 'outside perspective' - Your customers!

They are the ones who enable this revenue in the first place. So always keep them and their needs in mind.

This may sound like a lot at first, but don't worry. Later you will learn how to develop your strategy in 5 simple and implementable steps without forgetting the inside or outside perspective.

Why is Revenue Marketing becoming more important in 2024?

On average, B2B buyers spend most of the Customer Journey gathering extensive information about products and brands - mostly online. They spend only a fraction of the time talking to the vendors themselves. In fact, most prefer not to have to talk to sales at all. They prefer to find out their information by themselves.

For you, this means that your sales team only has a narrow time window to present all the important arguments, convince the buyer of the product quality, and motivate them to take action. Your low-touch conversion system must therefore deliver exactly the data that marketing needs to establish a connection to your sales.

Conversely, a lead has very little chance of being converted into a buyer if it is only pursued from a marketing perspective. This depends on many factors (e.g., industry, customer preference). You can be sure that there are always customers who prefer to talk to a person rather than nail it all down themselves. A holistic approach enables both your marketing and your sales to pursue the lead with different methods and improve the prospects.

Anyone who aligns marketing and sales achieves higher Conversion rates and experiences better customer loyalty. This is exactly the approach Revenue Marketing follows.

In today's times, when people are more aware of their needs and have access to endless data, Revenue Marketing is a great tool for you and your company to appeal to your (potential) customers and connect your teams.

In 5 steps to your Revenue Marketing strategy

To implement a strategy that is oriented towards Revenue Marketing, you don't have to turn everything you've done so far upside down. Rather see it as an opportunity to look at your previous marketing and sales successes and make sure they are as effective as you hope. You optimize and adjust so that your strategy matches your goal.

1. Define the roles of your sales and marketing team

In the best case, there is already a lot of overlap between sales and marketing, so your teams are already talking a lot to each other. Otherwise, this is the first construction site you should tackle. Regardless of Revenue Marketing, good coordination and efficient role distribution are advantageous here. To enable your growth plan in the spirit of Revenue Marketing, you need an effective communication plan. To do this, think about your sales cycles, digital personas, and channels - each from a marketing and sales perspective. Try to bring these perspectives together and let your teams participate in this process.

2. Record the entire Customer Journey

Visualize the entire course of the Customer Journey Map of your customers - from lead to lifetime customer. This shows you all the touchpoints you have with your customers over time, or they have with you. This helps you to look at your product, your brand, and your processes with the eyes of your customers. Also, let both teams look at your results. They know best how they make contact with your (potential) customers. This enables the improvement of the customer experience and makes the following steps easier for you.

3. Align your resources for the creation of suitable advertising material and campaigns

What is your goal? How far are you from it? Prepare campaigns and advertising materials in such a way that your sales can work with them properly and address the needs of your customers. More precisely,

Create content for each phase of the Buyer's Journey, use channels like LinkedIn for it and implement automated e-mail marketing. Educate cold target groups about your offer and give them assistance on related topics.

The quality of your content is crucial here!

Add other B2B marketing strategies that make sense for you and your company. The important thing is that you keep your goal in sight and keep checking in with marketing and sales.

4. Make sure your technology isn't hindering your growth

If you don't have a sales software with integrated marketing automation, you should seriously consider this investment. This will give you real-time insights into your sales, the type of customers who are buying, and the amount of revenue your sales and marketing campaigns are generating. You can find more information on this in the following chapter.

5. Determine which KPIs are essential for you

Which metrics do you want to use to keep an eye on your sales? Create a dashboard so that you can access and control the most important revenue metrics at any time. This way, you can see your progress at any time, communicate it, and adjust your strategy as needed.

Definitely use a hybrid attribution model. Ask customers how they became aware of you. Don't just rely on software.

With which tools does Revenue Marketing work?

There are some tools that can make it easier for you to implement effective Revenue Marketing. Here you'll find a selection of software that we use ourselves:

Marketing automation

The HubSpot Marketing Hub is a marketing automation software with integrated analysis tools. These enable data collection that helps you make informed and strategic decisions.

Project management

We use monday.com for our project management and for coordinating departments. Here you can adjust individually who should be notified when something has happened. This is especially useful in Revenue Marketing, as a lot is happening across departments and can be tracked, shared, and adjusted individually.

Communication

When there is a lot to discuss, you should make sure that everyone can communicate at any time. Especially for remote teams, the video call function is a big advantage. We use Slack for that.

Conclusion

Revenue Marketing is more than a trend - it is a decisive opportunity for the B2B industry and thus for you! With a focus on holistic revenue maximization, this strategy brings Marketing and Sales closer together, to provide your customers with the best possible Customer Journey.

The benefits range from improved team cooperation over increased customer satisfaction to optimized ROI, higher motivation of your employees and positively contribute to your financial planning. This proven strategy from the B2C sector not only offers quantitative, but above all qualitative successes.

With clear steps to the Revenue Marketing strategy, supported by helpful tools, this approach can be seen not only as a trend, but as a key to sustainable revenue growth. Be part of this development from the beginning and take your company to a new level of success.