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Join nowRevenue generation is a team sport — sales, marketing, customer success, and product development all play a role.
By Don Fernando, Senior Director, Revenue Cloud Product Management, Salesforce
February 20, 2025
It's a year out from your big planned expansion into the southwest region, but materials costs are climbing. Every unit you sell only brings in 75% of the revenue it once did. You won't have the cashflow to complete your new capital investment, but if you don't do that, the new customer-base you were counting on is inaccessible. You've got a serious revenue generation problem.
To put it in perspective, think of revenue as the icing on a cake: It looks great, but without strong foundational layers underneath, everything will crumble.
This raises an important question: should you prioritize revenue or profit ? While both are important, focusing on growing revenue can help you improve profitability over time.
Read on to learn all about the methods for generating revenue and how you measure their success.
Revenue generation is the combination of processes, technology, and strategies that help a business earn and grow revenue in a sustainable way. It includes things like:
And it's not just about the moment you bring revenue into the business — every bit of work that makes it easier to earn and predict cashflow is part of revenue generation.
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Some people might assume this job belongs to the sales team, but it's a responsibility shared among a few key groups:
Pulling in cash is important for obvious and not-so-obvious reasons, both in the long and short term. The main reasons you need to focus on revenue generation are to:
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Depending on your situation, you can opt for one or more kinds of ways to grow revenue. Here are the broad strategies you might consider:
There's a reason why 80% of sales reps are encouraged by leadership to prioritize long-term relationships over short-term wins. By aligning sales and service teams , you can grow existing accounts, reduce churn of displeased customers, and unlock new levels of revenue that can be relied upon for growth.
One major area for growth is in the sales you're already trying to make. The sales process itself can be a source of missed revenue:
The right price for your goods and services is whatever customers will pay in high enough volumes to make a solid profit. Your current pricing may be holding you back, so consider these pricing strategies :
Generally speaking, an existing customer has a lower acquisition cost than a new one. Upselling takes a current sale and pushes the buyers to higher-value aspects associated with it to increase the revenue the product brings in. Cross-selling adds related products and services to what the customer bought to increase the revenue. Try these common techniques:
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One of the biggest pitfalls in business is relying on a single revenue source, such as a single product line. By contrast, you can diversify your revenue streams to reduce risk, ensure stability, create growth opportunities, and make better use of resources. If one revenue stream lessens or disappears, the others can protect you from loss.
Start by analyzing your revenue streams in your CRM to find the proportion of revenue and profitability of each stream. Find specific customer segments for new opportunities and look into competitors and market trends.
Are there unmet needs in the market? Do you see opportunities to expand to a new region? Once you have this information, you can identify new potential revenue streams and create a new business plan to begin realizing this revenue.
A lot of the methods for finding new opportunities to grow revenue are easier to discover if you make use of a revenue growth platform. Users of a particular platform were able to reduce their quote turnaround time by an average of 34%, leading to fewer lost opportunities and greater growth on a faster scale.
What kind of features do they use?
Revenue generation is about getting money into your business, but it's not just about sales reps selling to customers. It's everything from the core strategy of the business, the mechanism for growth, and the constant searching for new frontiers to explore. And with the right technology pulling your data together for analysis, you can find even more opportunities to make your top line grow.
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