It is a family affair: Emma Storbacka, daughter and CEO at Avaus and Kaj Storbacka, father and professor at Hanken School of Economics have written an article together, where they analyze why we are not seeing more evidence of the business benefits of marketing and sales automation, and suggest a use-case-centric “revenue engine” that helps companies automate sales and marketing at scale with a higher success rate. Here is a short and concentrated summary of the article.
The revenue engine framework
The revenue engine framework forms a basis to successfully use extant resources to scale sales automation. The framework has two main components:
- The Data > Algo > Action methodology: The scalability of sales automation is dependent on a company’s capacity to create and operate use cases. Automation implies the use of algorithms and technologies to translate data into action.
- A managerial process for scaling: The Data > Algo > Action methodology can be viewed as the axis around which companies build a managerial process to scale up sales automation.
The managerial process, in turn, has three steps:
- Find focus by identifying value drivers (1): Use cases with a large value potential and high urgency should be prioritized.
- Drive scalability and standardization (2): To ensure scalability, processes need to be replicable across markets and business areas.
- Monitor outcomes and optimize processes (3): To keep the desired outcomes in mind and support a process of continuous learning related to scaling up, the data-driven sales and marketing company needs a rigid monitoring setup.
Managerial implications
As it challenges existent practices in most companies, implementing the above-described methodology and process will require leadership skills:
- At the start, managers need to understand the effort required to reach the target automation level. Do not underestimate the efforts needed.
- To keep the engine running, marketing and sales need to improve their data literacy. Ensure both skill and will.
Keeping these issues in mind, scaling up sales automation with the revenue engine improves the ROI of data and technology investments. Vroom!
Read the article in its entirety