Revenue Engine: A model you can build today to win and grow customers
Originally published on January 25, 2022. Estimated reading time: ~3 minutes.
There are only 3 things any product marketer should truly care about.
Market & Customer Insights
“Story” – an umbrella term to cover positioning, messaging, value prop, etc.
Revenue Engine
The last one is probably the most ambiguous among the three.
What is a revenue engine? You might get different answers depending on who you ask.
Everything from “an integrated sales and marketing system that powers your opportunity funnel” to “repeatable sales and marketing processes to drive predictable revenue” to “go-to-market functions responsible for revenue growth”.
They’re not incorrect but I want to offer an all-inclusive take on revenue engine from the product marketing perspective.
Revenue Engine connects your go-to-market (GTM) process, sales enablement, and pricing efforts into one actionable framework.
Let’s tackle each piece one by one as I highlight a simple revenue engine you can use today.
GO-TO-MARKET (GTM) PROCESS
Go-to-Market Process - Source: Yasmeen Turayhi
My favorite take on the Go-to-Market (GTM) process comes from Yasmeen Turayhi’s book “Product Marketing Debunked”. According to Yasmeen, the GTM blueprint “answers the 5Ws + H of a product launch”.
Who (W): Who is the target customer?
What (W): What is the target’s key problem that our product solves?
Why (W): Why would they want to use our product? What differentiates it from other options?
Where (W): Where will we reach target customers? Which channels?
When (W): When is the right time to reach them in their decision-making process?
How (H): How will we reach them? How will we position and message the product?
SALES ENABLEMENT & PRICING
“Sales enablement is the iterative process of providing your business’s sales team with the resources they need to close more deals. These resources may include content, tools, knowledge, and information to effectively sell your product or service to customers.” – HubSpot
Modified AARRR Framework
HubSpot’s definition highlights how sales enablement is all about better resources to win more customers.
To figure out the right type of sales enablement assets to develop, I found the “Pirate Metrics” framework (AARRR) by Dave McClure handy. Dave’s framework links customer behavior to metrics that any company can make sense of all the way to monetization. You can work through each letter of the acronym to figure out the right assets in this model of customer behavior.
Check out the AARRR framework below with my slight modification to include the option to “expand” your business with existing customers.
ACQUIRE – How do customers find you? (awareness)
ACTIVATE – How quickly can you get to the customer’s A-ha moment? (onboarding)
RETAIN – How can I keep customers coming back to me?
REFER – How can you turn your customers into your advocates? (advocacy)
EXPAND – How can I increase business from existing customers?
REVENUE – How much are customers paying? / How can you increase $? (monetization)
A SIMPLE REVENUE ENGINE
A simple revenue engine connects the go-to-market process to sales enablement and pricing on the back of the target CUSTOMER.
After your initial go-to-market plan, you need to ramp up the follow-up efforts to acquire onboard, retain, and grow your customers profitably.
You may have multiple product marketing initiatives in play at any time. Visualizing a revenue engine for your product or portfolio of products lets you organize all those efforts under one unified framework. It lets you know if you’re working on the right initiatives. And if you are, it also lets you know which initiatives are working, not working, and which ones need some tweaking.
The question for you now is “What does your revenue engine look like?”.
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