Revenue Disruption: Game-Changing Sales and Marketing Strategies to Accelerate Growth

Key Points

• Sales cycles are often depicted as stages in a pipeline that represent the buyers’ progression from awareness to sale.
• Most sales executives are wary of using disciplined sales processes that could conflict with the art of successful selling.
• Revenue cycles typically begin with buyers encountering information provided by marketing; sales cycles begin at the point of a prospect’s first contact with sales.
• The initiation point for a sales cycle is arbitrary and usually in the middle, rather than at the start, of the buyer’s journey.
• The sales funnel concept is widely used, but it is seriously misleading in several important respects, particularly including temporary obstacles experienced by buyers.
• The Revenue Cycle Model used with Revenue Performance Management does a better job of accounting for what is frequently a non-linear buyer’s journey.

1In choosing to refer to the end-to-end process of creating revenue as a “revenue cycle,” I want to acknowledge that this term has a very specific existing meaning in the context of the healthcare delivery industry in the United States, where “revenue cycle” refers to the complete set of processes from patient enrollment to billing for medical visits, to insurance management, to cash collection. I chose to use the term, despite this established meaning, because the analogy to the well-understood term “sales cycle” is too powerful to ignore. I apologize in advance if I confuse any healthcare revenue professionals among my readers. ...