How to solve the revenue gap in your company

    1560 1162 Shaun Alger
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    How’s your first quarter going?

    Set to meet or exceed projections? If so, GREAT!

    If not, read on.

    Revenue gap is the difference between what you need and what your sales funnel says you’re going to actually bring in for a given time period. ACTUAL, BOOKED or REALIZED revenue varies by industry. For example, you may win a construction project – but by the time it permits and materials are ordered, it may be 8 months before you can start invoicing. I’ll give you a real-world example of how we solved this for a VoloHaus customer at the end of this post.

    Getting back to the point: if you don’t get a grip on any revenue gaps now, early in the year, expect profuse sweating and probably nausea by the time 4Q rolls around, lol.

    So, let’s avoid becoming complacent if you aren’t meeting your sales targets. Now is the time to dig in and steer things right.

    To get the juices flowing, I will give you four proven ways to help close your revenue or sales gap.

    Increase your conversion rate (more sales per contact)

    The easiest way to fill your revenue gap comes from increasing your conversion rate. The same marketing dollar goes much further when you close a higher percentage of leads. If you want to sell 20 units and you have a 10% conversion rate, you can predict you’d need 200 solid leads to get there. That’s a lot of leads. By improving your conversions to 20%, you would make the same money with half the leads! AKA: work smarter not harder, as the old saying goes.

    Improving conversions is a company-specific deal with no “one-size-fits-all” answer, but I would look at A/B testing my emails and landing pages, hiring and training better salespeople and auditing my sales process for starters.

    Fix your marketing gaps 

    Many firms under-spend on marketing compared with revenue goals. Others spend way way too much—but on ineffective campaigns and channels. An important part of filling your revenue gap is to fix your marketing ROI problem.

    A competitive analysis can be very useful here. You need to understand what’s working for your competitors, so that you can implement it in your own company. Examine where the competition is getting their customers from and estimate their marketing spend based on that. Compare with your own spending and marketing channels to surface if there is anything that you can do differently that will help you get more customers fast.

    Boost Ideal Customer Acquisition

    To do this, you first need to know who your ideal audience is: their avatar. What’s the company’s size, specialty, and finance like? Strengths and challenges? Once we know who our target audience is, we can then use this information to create more targeted campaigns and better attract our ideal buyers. Hint—the first place to look to establish an ideal customer avatar is your best current and past customers. They’ve bought from you already—so what are the commonalities?

    It’s no use to market to the whole world. Be specific in your customer acquisition efforts.

    Identify new opportunities

    At Volohaus, we look at what’s working well at client companies, and we get them to do the same things repeatedly. We also look at what’s not working, and we try to find ways to make it work. However, sometimes unexpected things come up that lead to new opportunities.

    Here’s the real-world example I mentioned, in brief. We helped triple the revenue of a construction firm. But supply chain and permitting issues have pushed a few project starts until next year. And they have staffed up already. Thus – there is a “gap” to fill of new jobs to close and start and invoice THIS YEAR. We worked with them to successfully fill that gap by expanding the scope of projects they usually go after. These new opportunities closed their revenue gap and have kept a lot of people employed.

    It’s almost the end of Q1. I hope you are kicking boo-tay. If not, I stand ready to help with a proven process that scales with your business to keep growing year after year. Call me! 760.815.4464

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    Author

    Shaun Alger

    All stories by: Shaun Alger

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