With all the buzz right now around integrating AI and automation solutions into organizational strategy, it is worth taking the time to understand what kind of benefits marketing automation can offer and how to best utilize it to drive organizational success.

Let’s look at which kinds of activities are included in marketing automation, where it is best utilized to drive value, what its limitations are, the ethical considerations to keep in mind along the way, and what is coming next.

For the last 15 years I have worked as a content creator and copywriter, first for (what was then) the world’s leading ecommerce software provider and later for myself as a business owner. And today, I considered walking away from that to work for minimum wage at McDonald’s. Let me explain what happened...

An article in the March-April 2023 edition of the Harvard Business Review titled Beware a Culture of Busyness had a very strong message to share with readers: “Organizations must stop conflating activity with achievement.” It explains why busyness has become so valued in organizations these days as well as the significant damage that results from prioritizing and rewarding busyness. If you get a chance to read/listen to the article and want to share your thoughts with us, feel free to do so.

We would like to add our own thoughts based on what we have seen from helping B2B companies achieve strategic revenue growth for almost two decades. In our efforts to help move organizations away from a busyness culture we’re discussing the dangers of being busy, who is to blame for today’s busyness culture, and how to evolve to increase profitable revenue.

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.