Proven Strategies to Consistently Increase Your Sales Revenue

Learn how to supercharge your sales strategy and consistently increase revenue with these proven methods.

Every sales leader and sales manager is charged with increasing revenue. But many make it more difficult than it has to be. One way they make revenue growth more difficult is by believing that more opportunities in their pipeline automatically result in more revenue. It’s important to recognize that the opportunities you don’t win account for $0 in revenue. Another way sales leaders fail to grow revenue is by not focusing on increasing their team’s win rates (something we call sales effectiveness).

If you want to grow revenue consistently over time, you need just three initiatives. These three growth levers, when combined, form a reliable strategy for growing your revenue. Here we will explore the three initiatives that will drive your revenue growth.

Acquiring New Clients to Boost Revenue

The first way to grow your revenue is by acquiring net new clients. A new client contributes to revenue growth. Because the client is brand new to you and your company, 100 percent of their spend with you is all growth. To pursue this initiative, each salesperson on your sales team must create net new revenue by winning new deals.

In many industries, winning net new clients requires your sales force to displace your competitor. In this scenario, you capture net new revenue by taking it from your rivals. This is a Red Ocean strategy. You can find more on displacement strategies in Eat Their Lunch: Winning Customers Away from Your Competition.

But there is another way to improve your revenue growth. If you have lost clients, you lost the revenue you generated by serving them. Winning back the client’s business is net new revenue, even though you worked with them in the past. It is a mistake to focus only on net new clients without recovering your lost clients. This is the first of three ways to grow revenue.

Increasing Sales to Existing Clients for More Revenue

The second way to increase your revenue is to sell more to your existing clients. What makes this so effective is that you already have two advantages in this situation. The first advantage you have when selling to your existing clients is that you already have a relationship. Because they trust you and your sales team, you make it easy for your existing client to buy more from you. The second advantage is that you have a contract in place.

Sales organizations with the ability to cross-sell or upsell have an advantage when it comes to selling more to their clients. When you sell more to your existing clients, you are contributing to net new revenue. One of the most effective strategies here is to provide your client with a roadmap that explains the path your client will need to pursue over time. If you have a maturity model, share how your existing client can go from laggard to best-in-class by continuing to improve over time.

Raising Prices to Improve Revenue Growth

It can be difficult to increase your prices in a down economy, even though we have just experienced this after the pandemic. Just about everything costs more than it did before the world turned upside down. The longer you go without increasing your prices, the longer it will take for you to improve your revenue growth. No client is thrilled by the opportunity to pay more for what you are already doing.

This is something we can call economic maturity. Even though your clients will believe you are a vampire, sucking the blood out of their business, over time, you will have to explain that a price increase is necessary to continue to provide them with the outcomes they need from you. They might have had to do the same thing, increasing prices of what they sell, so you might find your contacts are at least a little understanding. If you approach this as a business consultant, you might find they commiserate with you, even if they aren’t happy about paying a higher price.

One additional strategy you might consider is to increase the price on every new client. Over time, you increase your revenue and your profitability.

Strategies for Revenue Growth Enablement

The enablement of revenue growth starts with a modern methodology, one that creates value for net new clients, as well as existing clients. You will also need to improve your sales force’s sales effectiveness through B2B sales training and coaching. You will also need to help your sales team succeed by making certain that they are pursuing net new clients, selling more to your existing clients, and, when it is possible, increasing your prices. The more effective your salespeople, the more certain you will grow your revenue.

You may want to categorize these three revenue growth levers in your CRM. Like the other metrics you need, you would do well to capture the revenue metrics in all three categories. You should also set goals for each of the three ways to grow revenue.

Leaving this article, assess your current revenue growth and where it comes from. If you rely heavily on one of the three ways to grow revenue, determine what you and your team will do to accelerate the revenue growth. If you rely too much on net new, you can increase revenue by focusing on the other two major ways to generate new revenue.