Revenue Growth (Glossary Definition)

What is revenue growth? Many times, people come to us and ask us for help with things that, if they really thought through, they probably just aren't thinking far enough ahead.

They tell us that they need more visibility and more brand awareness. If they're really on their game, they may say that they need more leads. But the reality, leads, in and of themselves, are exactly that -- they're just leads.

What they really want, if they were clearly articulating things, as they would want:

• Leads where a significant percentage of them progress to sales opportunities
• Sales opportunities where a significant percentage of them progress to new clients
• New clients that are ideal clients --- profitable

This is what will lead your company to the kind of revenue growth that you’re looking for. Not all clients that you serve and not all clients that you end up with are clients that are profitable to serve. Some are better than others.

Product/Market Fit

When you start to analyze who your most profitable clients are and who your most unprofitable clients are, you get dialed into your product/market fit. Product/market fit is the degree to which you know exactly who your ideal customers are, the products and services that they purchase, the quantities and durations they purchase, and the price points they purchase.

When you really get dialed into that, it's a lot easier to build a funnel that leads to profitable, scalable, and sustainable revenue growth. That’s how you need to think about this. It's not just about leads. We need leads that become sales opportunities. We need sales opportunities that become customers. And we need clients that we actually want -- those whom we can service profitably, that are a good fit for our products and services, and team and talent that we can work with and that we’d want to scale, replicate, and clone.

The Bottom Line

Because, after all, if we don't know the answers to that, how do we know where to invest future resources? If you're after revenue growth, make sure that you're thinking about the right kind of metrics -- that you're thinking about the right kind of funnel and spending a lot of time understanding your metrics and understanding your conversion rates.

As you build out a sales organization, spend time on your deal stages, so you understand what's working well and efficiently in your funnel and what needs more work and more optimization.  But if you're after revenue growth, if you're looking for positive, scalable, predictable revenue growth, make sure you build all of this on a solid foundation.

How do you define revenue growth for your business? Share your thoughts in the section for comments below.  

To learn more about revenue growth, enroll now in our free 7-day eCourse: Go-to-Market Strategy 101 for B2B SaaS Startups and Scaleups.