People get excited at the start of a new project. The vision of the gains to be made in a positive outcome really gets the energy and enthusiasm pumped up. The excitement of the start keeps the adrenaline flowing and the whole project gets a strong push in launching. No doubt, this is important. But the positive outcomes will only be realized if we have the discipline to sustain our efforts. Persistence, adaptation, and commitment to the long run, must also be fueled.
Whether you are growing a company, growing a following, or growing a brand, it is a marathon. As is highlighted in a recent study by Inc. Magazine,
“The only statistically significant predictor of a company’s future success is steady growth; short- and even long-term bursts mean almost nothing.”
Clearly this insight must be applied to your demand generation processes. Acquiring and nurturing prospective customers is a steady and on-going process. All the hoopla, glitz and swag that is injected at the start of a new marketing campaign, cannot alone deliver long term success.
But the marathon requires a different set of skills than the sprint. And hence, a different set of metrics to ensure you are achieving the slow and steady set of incremental gains, that will deliver both long term growth and sustainability. So the focus must be on determining the activities that are needed on a continuous basis, and how are we measuring individual and aggregated effectiveness.
Choosing metrics, measuring them, and interpreting them, must relate to your primary objective. So prior to starting the marathon, you must be clear on your destination, and the underlying assumptions which you hold to be true. Especially now, in the mobile-centric digital era that we are in, there is an ever growing number of things that can be tracked and measured. Ultimately, they all relate to the buyer persona and their journey through their buying cycle. But establishing and maintaining the right data set, which gives your business the right report card, is not always easy to establish, and will not stay static.
So what does it take to get this right? It requires a set of processes that are geared to uncovering and understanding why prospective buyers move through the buying cycle in the way that they do. We cannot assume that we have an inherent understanding of customers. We must seek out the data that explains the behavior that we see. And we must determine the right mix of marketing activities that will drive the data that moves you closer to your goals. And this is what the industry refers to as Revenue Performance Management. Eloqua nicely defines it as follows:
“Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is a systematic approach to identifying the drivers and impediments to revenue, rigorously measuring them, and then pulling the economic levers that will optimize marketing ROI and top line growth.”
It may all sound like an unrealizable utopia for your business growth. But the facts are well rooted in the results of the Inc. survey of companies who demonstrated sustained growth over the period 2007-2012. Average annual growth rate amongst companies over diverse industries was 35%. Not too bad in an economic period of huge uncertainty.