In many major companies, there has been a number of new positions created in the last decade to try and accommodate the changes in the strategic and competitive environment.
Among them has been the ‘Chief Revenue Officer’ (CRO)
In some cases, this reflects the need for increased collaboration and sometimes convergence of marketing and sales. In others, it is just the fashion, the latest management fad.
This seems to be particularly the case in businesses where another of those-acronym driven fads has evolved, ABM, (Account Based Marketing)
The barriers to the integration of Marketing and Sales are high, and deeply set into the functional status quo of most organisations, and highly resistant to change. However, the emergence of digital tools has accelerated the trend, and the recent Covid challenges have been a catalyst for further and quicker evolution than would otherwise have been the case.
For years I have been advocating ‘Alignment’ of marketing and sales to the needs of specific customers, and the ways to achieve that outcome.
Removing the Marketing and Sales labels has proved to be useful to the integration. The emerging combined function recognises that the responsibility of each is simply Revenue Generation, or ‘RevGen’
The first substantial consulting assignment I had 25 years ago introduced my client, a domestically owned multinational supplier of ingredients to the food industry, to Strategic Key Account Management. (SKAM)
We went through a process of identifying the specific needs of key customers, and tailored our marketing and sales effort, to the expressed and often jointly uncovered needs of customers, with whom we engaged in the process.
Those workshops and subsequent implementation efforts are as relevant now as they were 25 years ago, probably more so. It is now just a component of Revenue Generation, a descriptor of the best way to make profits by delivering value to customers.
The core assumption of SKAM is that that only by doing one or more of the following, could we be successful.
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- Assisting our customers to increase their sales,
- Actively reducing their costs,
- Increasing their productivity.
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We set ourselves the task of identifying how we could achieve at least one of those three things, preferably two, and focussed our efforts on delivering those outcomes.
Predictably, it was a successful initiative, customers loved the collaboration. Inventory levels reduced, as customer service levels and responsiveness increased, generating increased trading profits.
Perhaps it was too successful, as the business was then sold by its parent company, at a very high multiple to a multinational competitor.
