Question! How much money do you want to make...? Like many business owners, you would have asked yourself the same question. How much money do you want to make?

It is a question that many business owners ask themselves when they are deciding what to do with their website. This is where Revenue-Intelligence comes into play. It It  is a skill that will help you answer this question and it can be learned. 

Revenue intelligence can be a great tool for a business to use in order to better understand the revenue of your company and monitor all these sources of information that can help you identify patterns that may not have been found before or were difficult to notice otherwise.

Let’s Clear What Is Revenue Intelligence?

Revenue intelligence is understanding how your marketing initiatives work together and how they affect your bottom line. It is a process of leveraging data to drive revenue growth. 

Revenue-intelligence also provides insights into how organizations can achieve their business goals and objectives through an understanding of what drives customer decision-making. HOW? Well it gathers and analyzes data to make well-informed decisions regarding revenue.

Revenue-intelligence can be used in a variety of situations such as when working with clients, meeting financial expectations, or determining business strategies. It requires an understanding not only of how to gather the information but also what it means if gathered correctly and how it should be analyzed based on its specific use. 

It's like having a team of people watching over your customer base 24/7 for you! Revenue-Intelligence can transform your business with...

• People who are tired of simply reacting to the market in real time, finally taking control over their revenue destiny.
• People who are looking for a growth edge to beat their competitors with game changing insights
• People who want to ensure they fully understand what is driving their growth (and decline) at all times.
  

Web analytics has traditionally been used by webmasters and marketing professionals but it's now becoming increasingly popular among decision makers too, because there is increasing pressure on companies to demonstrate that all of the money spent on advertising is good value for customers, brands and shareholders alike. 

RI lets you know if this spend is working or not. It can provide a return on investment analysis of digital marketing campaigns - once a campaign has finished you'll have access to an easy-to-read report detailing how each channel performed. 

Why Should You Use Revenue-Intelligence?

There are several benefits that will come with revenue-intelligence, which are briefly mentioned below. Let me explain each one in detail so you know what to expect when revenue-intelligence is applied.

1. Value Chain Improvements - Improved understanding of your value chain can help you determine where your value begins and ends. By understanding where your value begins and ends you can better determine the point at which you need to be adding value.

Once this is understood, you can begin focusing on improving each aspect of your value chain in order to maximize the added value that is offered to customers. It will improve customer satisfaction because they are receiving a higher quality product or service for a lower price due to all the improvements made along the way.

2. Decreased Costs - By identifying flaws within your company you can save money by taking corrective action before it becomes an issue that costs more money down the road. In addition, It allows companies to cut out middlemen that may not add as much value as executives initially thought. 

These factors combined with improved processes and increased efficiency allows companies to offer better value to the customer while at the same time decreasing costs.

3. Improved Customer Satisfaction - By providing a higher quality product or service for a lower price you will have happier customers over all. It allows companies to increase efficiency, reduce defects and flaws, and remove middlemen from their business model. 

It can improve overall customer satisfaction levels by giving them a better deal on a more valuable product or service.

4. Customer Retention - When current customers are satisfied with your company they will be less likely to switch vendors in the future. This is what is called customer retention; retaining your existing customers while gaining new ones that meet certain criteria. 

These criterias include geography, price sensitivity, and other variables which are determined by research done through intelligence tools.

5. Less Time to Market - When companies execute intelligence strategies and use business intelligence it allows them to get products and services to market faster because there is less time spent on finding ways to improve the process. 
   

Instead, time is spent making improvements and implementing new processes that cut out man hours and reduce defects and rework.

6. Improves Decision Making - All of the above factors help in decision making when management or executives are looking at where they should invest their next dollar into a company. If a company is performing well then further investment will improve productivity levels, customer satisfaction, reduced costs, etc. 

This would be an example of receiving a high return on your investment similar to the high ROI many organizations seek when purchasing large ticket items such as vehicles and manufacturing equipment.

It is a term used to describe the ability of an organization to use various business intelligence tools along with their internal systems in order to better identify areas that can be improved or optimized. 

The information gathered through these BI tools helps management make more informed decisions on how they should allocate their future dollars into the company because it allows them to know where to invest, what initiatives will best improve productivity and performance levels, and much more.

Elements of a Effective Revenue Intelligence Strategy

An effective strategy is based on the following five key elements:

1. Conducting an organisational assessment of business processes and data capabilities to identify opportunities for improvement.

2. Developing plans to prioritise actions and implement new revenue generating initiatives that leverage existing processes, systems and people

3. Defining management dashboards that align with the new vision and goals of the organisation and which facilitate continuous feedback loops between data, decisions and actions. 

4. Selecting software solutions that easy access to reliable, relevant information in order to support decision making, compliance and reporting requirements

5. Identifying the right people to lead the initiative, for example in-house experts or partners.

How To Build A Revenue Intelligence Strategy

You can build a strategy by doing market research and understanding your customers/visitors.

Then you need to understand where they come from; including social media, referral traffic and other sources like newsletters and blogs (to name a few). Let's take a look at the process:

STEP 1: Revenue-Intelligence Targets Market Research to Determine Your Ideal Customers

First, you need to start looking for your ideal customers. To do this you need to go out there and find them! There are several ways you could approach this:

• Get on Twitter and search for relevant keywords such as "designers," "web designers," etc. This will produce many results that should give you an idea of who is doing what.
• Use Facebook/LinkedIn/etc. to search for people (via targeted audience) who are in your industry or work at specific companies you know cater to your market.
  

You'll be surprised how many business connections that person has, and you can reach out asking for introductions within their network. This is just the very beginning of determining your ideal customers, but it's a good start.

STEP 2: Revenue-Intelligence Targets Market Research to Determine Where They Visit Most Often

Now that you have an idea of who our target customers are, let's find them! Using online tools like Google Analytics will give you insight into where they visit the most often via referral traffic which helps immensely since this will inform marketing campaigns.

STEP 3: Revenue-Intelligence Targets Market Research to Determine Their Company Size and Expected Budgets

Now that you know where your ideal customers visit most often, let's find out how big their company is and what kind of budget they expect to spend with you. 

Tools like Hoovers can help you research companies to determine those metrics; as well as other interesting information about them such as size, products/services offered (to name a few). By using tools like these, we can target large sized companies who have an expected budget that will allow you to provide the services they need - just what YOU want!

You can also use Google Adwords Word Tool or Wordstream's Adwords Grader to determine what types of keywords are being used most often by your customers. This will help you build out ad campaigns with high ROI - so it's well worth the time you'll put in!

STEP 4: Revenue-Intelligence Targets Market Research to Know What They Want

Now that you know who they are, where they visit most often, and their company size/budget - let's find out what they want! To do this, there are a few services that can provide valuable insight into what they're looking for. 

For example, Crazy Egg is an excellent tool that provides heat maps which show where on a site people scroll down to, or where they click a page. 

Another great service that provides a lot of insight is UserTesting.com which allows you to test out various websites and determine how easy it was for someone to complete a task. This can be crucial because if the site isn't user-friendly people will leave - and you don't want that since they're your ideal customers!

You Can Follow Few Strategies For Revenue Intelligence Process

Today, it is imperative to standardize and direct revenue-intelligence processes. While the specific requirements may vary from one organization to another, there are a number of key areas that can be identified as common components across most organizations for creating and directing the right information at the right time.

• The process should start with understanding customer needs through market research, market intelligence and sales channel analysis. This is the foundation of planning revenue generation activities.
  

• Develop a clear understanding of what you are trying to accomplish in your revenue strategy in four key areas: new products, existing product expansions, geography expansion and customer segmentation. 
  

Then you must decide which one of these areas is pertinent to your business model. After identifying these critical areas, you can then develop strategies for each area either by using in-house resources or outsourcing the services to consultants who specialize in this work.

• Processes should include creating alignment between marketing efforts and revenue efforts by putting in place measures that will track results after each market initiative or campaign undertaken by an organization. A comprehensive set of metrics should be identified for all initiatives to track things like lead-to-customer ratio or revenue per marketing dollar spent.
  

• After creating alignment, it is also essential to measure the results through setting up clear success criteria for each revenue initiatives. You should develop a set of operational definitions for identifying wins and losses so that they can quickly take corrective actions when needed without wasting too much time on analysis.
  

• Once all these steps are taken into consideration, you must then determine how you will disseminate the information across the enterprise. 
  

The key is to have one common system where everyone who needs specific actionable intelligence can access it easily at any given time, rather than depending on multiple systems that may not be integrated properly with one another. This ensures accurate information flow effectively throughout the revenue chain.

As with most processes, it is imperative for an organization to develop a set of best practices and establish a structure that will guide, direct and monitor the execution on a regular basis regardless of how many changes or disruptions may take place from time to time. 

Conclusion

Revenue-intelligence is a framework that will help you understand and improve your company’s revenue performance. It focuses on being able to measure the contribution of specific business activities or projects towards revenue growth, as well as pinpointing those areas where efforts have been unsuccessful at increasing sales so corrective action can be taken. 

In its most basic form, it tracks what happens before a customer purchases from us, through to our final payment for providing whatever product or service they've acquired.

For example: It could help you identify which marketing channels are leading to increased website traffic and conversions by looking at web analytics data such as number of visitors, page views etc., 

You can then compare this with changes in your conversion rates in the same period. Or if you have a high turnover of staff, you could compare the average tenure each year to find out what effect your organisation's culture is having on retention.

It will help you to measure your business growth against competitors (including direct competitors), classed industry peers and geographical benchmarks plus monitor what's working now - not three months ago! So if there was one thing stopping you moving up through your peer group to the next level... now there isn't - You've got Revenue-Intelligence!