10 Things To Impact Your Company Revenue (Part 1) | President Accretive Solutions Kerry Barrett

First thing, this is 10 things you can do to impact revenue starting today. The first one is to expand the pie. So, giant piece of pie. And what does that mean? So expand the pie is a concept that I think about when I'm thinking about selling services or selling products. Instead of thinking about, well, how do I get my little chunk? It seems to me today the way business happens is about how do you expand the pie for everyone? How do I take whatever it is that I have to offer today and offer it out in the market, but maybe there's partners or other folks that I can work together with that have something to offer as well, and maybe we can figure out a way to either go to market together or build an alliance? We'll talk a little bit more about your ecosystem. You know, what are those things today that you can do to expand the pie instead of taking, you know, figuring out how to get your sliver of the pie. So that's the concept that comes into play a lot in the world that I am in, because in the business of services, we sell, you know, certain services, and what we find is that any existing customer is your best source of additional business. So rather than spend many, many more cycles to go out and just constantly hunt for new business, expanding the pie is also about finding adjacent services or things you can sell within your own existing clients. So the cost of sale is just significantly lower in your existing clients. So I always think about what's your revenue per client and how do you grow that figure in your existing clients. Great. Client base while you're growing your new clients. So expand the pie is a, it really kind of captures that concept. I think number 2, yep, bundle better. Okay, bundle better. Bundling of services, a similar idea, but it's different than trying to just sell more services within the same client. Again, depending on what your product is, or if it's a piece of technology or so on, the more so that you can package services together so that, you know, I mean, this is extremely intuitive. And in fact, by the way, a lot of these concepts are really, really simple in concept, but I always see again and again and again, I always say if every one of us did every one of these things every day, even in our own firm, our firm would be— our own firm would be significantly larger. We don't take our own advice well enough, and one of those ideas is bundle better. We have a tendency to go in and sell our services into one aspect of an organization without thinking about, well, maybe instead of thinking about the actual product and pushing the product out, we really try to come from the standpoint of what's the business issue? What's the issue we're trying to solve here? If your product or service solves a certain issue in the marketplace, focusing in on what that business issue is and making sure it aligns back to your business is a really effective way to sell your service. Rather than saying, hey, we've got something that we think is really exciting, that concept of, hey, we've identified a real hole in the marketplace and this service or product addresses that issue, and by the way, we have a suite of products or we bundle together a set of services and products that actually address that particular issue. The more so that you can bundle together services, obviously your own sale is going to increase. Your per person, per buyer sale is going to increase. Again, depending on what all you are interested in developing or selling, think about how How you may be able to bundle together services, whether it's your own or whether it's through partnerships out in the marketplace. Price it right. Price it right. Okay. Number 3, price it right. So pricing is a topic near and dear to my heart, and I imagine you all, if you're all, especially if you all have your own, your businesses, you're thinking a lot about pricing. Pricing is obviously the holy grail if you can get that right. And that was my focus in business school, pricing. What I find a lot is that depending on what it is that you're going to market with, pricing misses the mark. You're either pricing based on competition or you're pricing based on what you think the product's value is or you're doing a cost-plus model. My only advice to you would be just really, really study your pricing model really carefully, especially early on. If you think there's, you know, you have a first market position or there's other clearly defining sort of differentiators about your product or service, just ensure that you don't leave money on the table. I will tell you again, in being in a consulting firm, pricing is everything. There's our business is very simple. I always say if you want to be in consulting, it's pretty. pretty much billable hours and the work effort, and then what do you charge for them? And all too often, I think our firm is guilty of sort of pricing things based on what we think the perceived market value, or what we think the client's value is, instead of really saying, wow, this particular offering has a higher willingness to pay by our client because it's either perceived as highly Highly complex, you know, if it's high complex, highly risky, and if it's high profile, I always say then that leads to higher pricing. So just be sure, you know, you don't take a one-size-fits-all approach to pricing when it comes to your products. That's another area where, you know, again, also if you start lower, it's very hard to build up from there. Again, a very basic concept. You think about pricing of your products. But wherever you start, it's pretty hard to move off that anchor. And so just be sure that you're setting your targets right from the get-go. Any questions on that? Okay. Watch the clock. I wish you had these visuals because they're just— they're kind of fun, actually. Watch the clock is just nothing more than careful time management. It's another, another, yeah, and I saw you watching your watch, it's good. Time management to me is absolutely key in everything that we do. In our business, I always say that, you know, there are, you have to be really selfish about your time. Time is everybody's most precious commodity. It happens to also be our clients' most most precious commodity. So I always say, you know, when you're spending time with your clients, you got to make sure, number one, that that time is valuable for them. What are you bringing to the table to talk with your clients or prospects about that's interesting, that, you know, will move the dial for their business, that's unique? Or, you know, do your homework, do your research. And then likewise, in terms of watching your own clock, your time is really valuable, and there are a lot of people who will waste your time. There are a lot of people out there that will take your time and use your time. And you have to start to be really selfish about, how am I spending my time? And is it getting me to where I need to be? And so it's all— yes, go ahead. I hope maybe we can ask some questions. Although I didn't completely enjoy that time at the end of the second one. She's still moving. So regarding time management, would you recommend, say, going, OK, Yeah, that's good. I tend to look at time more— if I look at a pie, I look at it in percentages versus amounts of time. And maybe it's more about, so what are the key activities that I need to do to do what I need to get done? any given week perhaps or day. You're right, you've got to be nimble. We can't be rigid. Depending on where you're at, if you're developing your product and it's ready to go to market, the time that you spend, say, on preparatory go-to-market events is going to be different than once your product's to market, per se. My recommendation would be to think, actually just to log, think about it. How am I spending my time now? Just as an exercise, go through that and— wow, everybody. It's bright. There you go. You gotta show them like 1, 2, and 3 just for kicks. It's right before lunch, that expand the pie is like, you know, it's gonna get everybody hungry. There you go. Expand the pie. Giant piece of cherry pie. Yeah, 2, let's see, bundle better. So obviously that's packaging. Price it right. And number 4, watch the clock. Watch the clock, yeah. So again, I would just recommend, just as an exercise, you might think about, well, how am I spending my time today proportionally? If you say, well, 30 minutes on this, an hour on this, then translating that into percentages, how much time am I spending administratively? How much time am I spending out in the marketplace talking to potential clients? I mean, at least I will just tell you from a pure— I've been running and managing sales organizations, you know, even in my job today, I consider myself as the CEO of our firm, our top salesperson. I mean, our top— like, that's my job, is to help us succeed in selling our services. There's never a day that I'm not thinking about that. So I always think, how much time am I spending with my customers? And I'm mindful of that. How much time am I spending administratively? How much time am I spending in meetings? And if you have a real honest sort of take at that, and if they're meetings, are they internal, are they external, are they necessary? And then I would think about, well, do you think that's the right mix? And if there's anything that you need to tweak today that might say, hey, you know what, I realize that I'm spending 40% of my time on administrative tasks, which is Which is, by the way, that's an outlandish number. It should be probably 5% of your time on administrative tasks. Mm-hmm. You know, 40 to 50% time market-facing or getting ready to be market-facing and so on. You know, it's just an exercise I think is worth going through because what we find in terms of productivity, I mean, when you can eke out, you know, especially when time is of the essence or you're trying to get funding or you're trying to get your product to market, Even gaining another 20, 30, 40 minutes a day can make a big difference. So that's really where I'm coming from with that. And so, you know, I don't know if that's getting to the essence of it, but trying to— that's just— it's one of those things that I think all too often— and the other thing I notice a lot, especially when I manage salespeople, is that you just do the activities that are most comfortable first. You know, it's like, oh, this one's gonna— I have to go try to talk to this difficult customer or potential customer or this, you know, and you sort of like always put off the things that are the least comfortable. And if you can get out of that paradigm, that will make a difference as well. It's hard to do, but that's one of the biggest coaching things we do with our selling organization, is to say, you know, where are you spending your time? Let's make some adjustments there.