Competition a Bear? Explore New Avenues of Revenue Growth

The CEO’s main role is to carefully point their company to compete in markets that have great growth characteristics. Product and finance background chief executive officers tend to lean toward leaving the decisions on which markets to compete to sales and marketing leaders. When fighting the competition becomes a bear, the CEO can’t rely on an A-Player head of sales to sell their way through a disadvantaged growth strategy. It’s difficult to grow revenue faster than your industry’s growth rate and faster than your competitors. Leverage SBI’s How to Make Your Number in 2018  to access a revenue growth methodology to hit your number quarter after quarter, and year after year.

Top CEOs develop a corporate strategy that includes clarity on which markets to compete so that when you execute his or her strategy, through marketing and sales execution, you have success. In more simple terms, we’re talking about putting the boat over the fish, so that when you drop the line in the water you can catch something. Being in the right markets, with the right products, at the right time.

Today’s show will demonstrate how to create new markets through new products, attract new customers to an existing product, and convince current customers to buy more of an existing product.  This is a deep dive on product strategy.

Our guest is Sudhakar Ramakrishna, the Chief Executive Officer of Pulse Secure. A leading provider of secure access and mobile security solutions, Pulse Secure serves enterprise-level companies and service providers. As companies increase productivity through the adoption of cloud and an ever-mobile workforce, Pulse Secure provides the security to safeguard your company. Watch as Sudhakar demonstrates how to attract new customers and how to convince current customers to buy more of an existing product. 

Why this topic is important? Not all revenue growth is equal. Some revenue growth creates more enterprise value than others. Revenue growth that comes from increasing market share for a product does not create much long-term value because competitors can easily retaliate. Revenue growth driven by increasing prices of certain products comes at the expense of the customer, who can retaliate by buying less and seeking substitute products. Revenue growth that’s driven by products that create new markets, attract new customers, and convince customers to buy more, is the most valuable type of revenue growth.

Watch as we discuss the different types of revenue growth and which revenue growth is worth more than others.  We talk through the approach when determine whether a company should create an entirely new category or participate in a category within existing category through innovation. New category creation has very different cost dynamics. Different customer acquisition costs and strategic time horizons. Watch as we discuss what goes into this decision for a CEO.  

All companies have portfolios, not just products, and those products are on different life cycles. We discuss how the strategy is going to be a little different between products so this requires dynamic reallocation of people, money, and time, depending on where this portfolio is in its life cycle and the products within it.

Have expectations gone up and left you wondering if you can make your number? Here is a tool that will help you understand if you have a chance at success. Take the Revenue Growth Diagnostic test and rate yourself against SBI’s sales and marketing strategy to find out if:

• Your revenue goal is realistic
• You will earn your bonus
• You will keep your job