Revenue Performance Management

Revenue Performance Management 101

by Phil Fernandez, President and CEO of Marketo
Generating revenue is the lifeblood of any business. Too often, sales is viewed as the revenue creator and marketing is considered to be a cost center that is not fundamental to the revenue creation process at all. This traditional model has resulted in inefficiencies at every step of the revenue cycle and prevents companies from achieving maximum revenue performance.

However, several key trends — including the rise of online marketing such as Google, emerging social media networks, and a new focus on measurement and accountability in marketing — are creating the opportunity for organizations to rethink their revenue performance management.

In this new model companies transform the way they operate and enable marketing and sales alignment by:

• Managing the marketing department as a true revenue-generating organization;
• Adopting a perspective that revenue creation starts when a company first meets a prospective buyer and continues to deal close and onward to ongoing customer loyalty;
• Implementing a systematic process of nurturing prospective buyers forward through the revenue cycle, and measuring buyer engagement at every step of the process;
• Providing sales teams with the information and tools they need to prioritize their time so that they can engage with the most qualified prospective buyers, at exactly the moment each buyer is ready to act;
• Measuring the effectiveness and return-on-investment of spending on people and programs at every step of the revenue cycle across marketing and sales; and
• Using these facts about effectiveness and ROI to allocate investments to accelerate results achieve unprecedented visibility and predictability into revenue performance.

Revenue Performance Management Defined

Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is a strategy to optimize interactions with buyers across the revenue cycle to accelerate predictable revenue growth.

In order to achieve this kind of transformation, companies must address organization, compensation and incentives, job roles, and work practices as well as their technology infrastructure.

Marketo’s vision is to enable this business transformation by providing the tools, thought leadership, and best practices to change how marketing and sales work — and work together — to help companies of all sizes to adopt Revenue Performance Management and accelerate predictable revenue growth.

Read the RPM blog: New Study Quantifies Dramatic Growth From Revenue Performance Management