There is an old adage in business: “If your business isn’t moving forward it’s standing still, and your competition is gaining on you.”

This time of year I have a lot of conversations with business leaders about how they can get their business moving in the right direction. The CEOs I talk to tend to fall into one of two camps – either their organizations are in decline (their sales have fallen off and they need help bringing them back), or they have plateaued (their growth has gone stagnant, and they need help jumpstarting it).

In either scenario if business leaders choose not to do anything, they will just continue in the circumstances they are in. They will either continue declining until they fail, or they will remain plateaued until their competitors overtake their market share and then they will fail. The outcome is the same, although the time horizons will differ. If, however, these business leaders decide to take the steps needed to reinvent their organizations, they can achieve the outcomes they desire now and continue to evolve in the future.

There is plenty of advice available for business owners and CEOs of struggling companies to help them right the ship. But what if your “problem” is simply just that you are doing well and need to figure out how to take the next steps to grow revenue?

Every day I work with organizations that are succeeding, but they are stuck where they are. Their current revenue figures have plateaued, and they are unable to get to that next level. The issue they need to tackle is not staying afloat, it is figuring out how to increase their speed to win the race.

How do companies that have their business model figured out and are on sure footing propel themselves forward to that next leap in revenue growth? This revenue growth guide will give you the tactical advice you need to build a growth strategy to take your company to the next level!

If you are asking this question, you are already doing something right. Taking the time to analyze whether your Go-To-Market (GTM) strategy needs to be either refreshed or overhauled is a critical component of keeping up with both the market and your industry.

Determining whether you need a new B2B GTM strategy this year will depend largely on how old your existing plan is. If your GTM strategy was developed before COVID and has not been updated since, it definitely needs attention. If it was written or updated over the last two years, it likely still needs work but may not have to be rebuilt from the ground up.

Back in 2012 Forbes dubbed the Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) “the CEO’s new secret weapon,” highlighting the importance of this role in C-suite leadership. Over the last decade the way we view revenue has evolved, paving the way for the CRO role to expand and flourish. In fact, Stephen Hurrell has forecasted that, “By 2023, almost one-quarter of organizations will establish a Chief Revenue Officer leadership role, focusing on all channels of revenue, not just direct sales.”

Anita Little explains the business rationale behind the rise in CRO roles when she says, “Businesses are realizing that to stay agile, strategic, and most importantly, sustainable, they need a CRO who can fold marketing, sales, and customer success into one seamless revenue machine.”

However, whether a company employs a CRO or not, it is still crucial to understand how revenue has evolved. Staying ahead of your competition requires a firm understanding of how to evaluate revenue, where digitalization has changed revenue generation, who should be included in revenue conversations, and what strategic revenue planning looks like in a post-pandemic world.

“The ability to withstand unpredictable threat or change and then to emerge stronger.”

This is how the team at McKinsey & Company defines resilience in their recently published an article on what they call The Resilience Imperative. They elaborate further that resilience is going to be more important in the coming decade than ever before when they explain, “Catastrophic events will grow more frequent but less predictable. They will unfold faster but in more varied ways. Disruption is becoming more frequent and more severe.”

Resilience can be financial, operational, technological, organizational, or reputational in nature but the greatest resiliency comes when an organization can anticipate and respond to threats across all categories to dynamically adapt as needed. Obviously, this kind of resiliency does not just fall into place – it is the result of careful planning to develop a revenue resiliency toolkit.

The term “Revenue Operations” is soaring in popularity these days. In fact, Chief Revenue Officer, VP of Revenue Operations, and Director of Revenue Operations are among the fastest growing job titles right now on LinkedIn.

But what is Revenue Operations?

Does your business need it?

And, if you do, how do you establish a Revenue Operations framework?

Revenue Operations (or RevOps for short) is an approach that aims to align sales, marketing, and customer service teams to give them the tools and resources needed to drive predictable revenue. As Bhaskar Roy explains in an article on the rise of Revenue Operations, “RevOps treats revenue not as a fortunate outcome of a quality product, but like a mirror of the supply chain — a pipeline that needs to be powered by optimized business processes.”

Over the last several decades personality evaluations like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, DiSC test, Core Values Index (CVI), and PATH assessment have made managers more aware of the different types of individual personalities represented in their employees, and how best to unify them around a set of organizational goals. These assessments highlight an individual’s predominant characteristics and traits to better understand what motivates them, which types of roles they are best suited for, and how to interact with them for optimal results.

But what about personality types that stick out from the crowd dramatically – the colloquial “sharp edge of the circle” so to speak?

A recent Fast Company article highlighted a unique personality that they called the “Rare Breed.” They explain that these so-called Rare Breeds do not conform, are outspoken, rebel against the establishment, exhibit unparalleled drive, and obsessively strive for high achievement at all costs. The article goes on to say that while companies typically view these as vices, they are also what drives innovation, making this personality type integral for organizations that prioritize out-of-the-box thinking. However, their big egos, short tempers, and manipulation of those around them can also be damaging to an organization if left unchecked.

Do you know anyone like that at your company?

The pandemic hit many industries and demographics hard, but some shouldered the burden more than others. Women, especially working mothers, were overwhelmingly negatively affected.

In fact, the 2020 Women in the Workplace report revealed that 25% of working women and over 30% of mothers with young children were “contemplating downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce” with mothers citing increased domestic and child-care responsibilities as their primary motivation for doing so. The study summarized,

“Women in particular have been negatively impacted. Women—especially women of color—are more likely to have been laid off or furloughed during the COVID-19 crisis, stalling their careers and jeopardizing their financial security. The pandemic has intensified challenges that women already faced. Working mothers have always worked a ‘double shift’—a full day of work, followed by hours spent caring for children and doing household labor. Now the supports that made this possible—including school and childcare—have been upended. Meanwhile, Black women already faced more barriers to advancement than most other employees. Today they’re also coping with the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on the Black community.”

While these challenges impact women individually, the cumulative effect of women leaving the workforce significantly affects the companies they work for as well.

So, how can B2B companies keep women among their ranks and on their leadership teams?