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FAQ's

One of the most frequent comments that our clients share with us is the need for sales and marketing to develop a common language. On this page, you'll find some of the concepts and language we use, along with quick answers about our company.

If you have any questions that are not covered here, please do not hesitate to drop us a line at hq@revenuestorm.com.

What is Revenue Storm?
Revenue Storm is a sales consulting firm that helps clients implement processes and disciplines to drive sustained revenue acceleration. We provide comprehensive consulting, training, coaching and rigorous analytics to help Fortune 1000 firms create demand and increase profitable, sustainable revenues by 10% to over 100% enterprise-wide. For more on our company and its history, go to our Company page.
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What makes Revenue Storm different?
We pick up where other companies leave off. We conceived the first integrated management approach to profitable revenue growth and developed the first comprehensive set of tools and methodologies to drive swift, sustainable results across all key metrics. We are so confident in our results, we are willing to guarantee them by linking our success to yours.
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What capabilities does Revenue Storm offer?
What we do is simple enough: We design, develop and install what we call a revenue generating engine that accelerates revenue, delivering measurable results in 9 to 15 months.

How we do it depends on the client's environment and priorities, but the nature of our engagements usually includes some combination of assessment and analytics, executive workshops and consultation, front line sales management coaching, and salesforce training and coaching.

For more details, see our How We Help pages.
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What industries does Revenue Storm serve?
All of our clients face a common imperative: the need to accelerate revenue, align critical resources and generate demand in the marketplace. Many are striving to keep buyers from commodifying their offerings and to create differentiated messages that are real. We have helped companies in all sorts of industries, such as:

  • Manufacturing
  • Chemicals
  • Pharmaceuticals
  • Financial Services
  • Telecommunications
  • Sofware
  • Hardware
  • IT Services
  • Consulting Firms and more

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How do you define revenue acceleration?
Revenue acceleration is a comprehensive approach to managing a sales process that is designed to compress the sales cycle from suspect to sale. It is a way of doing business, a call to action, an organizational philosophy. It challenges the organization to remove barriers and enable the salesforce to generate more revenue, faster.
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How do you accelerate revenue?
Revenue Storm brings clarity to an organization’s revenue strategy, challenges the organization to remove revenue barriers, helps develop a defined revenue process with which to pursue deals with minimal wasted effort and provides tools, training and coaching to enable the salesforce to generate more revenue faster. Our tools and methodology are field-proven and based on the latest research and thought leadership in sales and marketing. Taken together, our revenue acceleration tools and methodology have the effect of installing what we call a revenue generating engine.
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What is a revenue generating engine?
The process of generating revenue is more than just a function of the salesforce or responsibility of the sales division. There are several dynamic and interrelated components that reach across an enterprise. When these are aligned around an effective and purposeful sales strategy, they become a revenue generating engine. These key components include the following:

The entire enterprise is in alignment with the sales strategy, or more specifically, what we call the Go-to-Market Strategy: executive management, revenue pursuit teams, revenue support functions (such as marketing, offering development, sales support and client delivery) and organizational functions (such as human resources, information technology, finance and legal).

The organizational and individual competencies required to execute the Go-to-Market Strategy are accurately identified and managed.
The enterprise has implemented a well-defined revenue generation process (or sales process) and demand creation process (which is a subset of the revenue generation process).
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How long does it take to design, develop and implement a revenue generating engine?
Since this is our core area of expertise, we’re prepared to go as fast as you and your team. Depending on the number of revenue streams you choose to tackle and the size of your salesforce, we should be able to take a client through the implementation stage within 90-120 days.
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What is a Go-to-Market Strategy?
Although this term is used at some companies to refer specifically to a project launch strategy, we use the term more broadly. At Revenue Storm, a Go-to-Market Strategy is a purposeful and defined strategy to serve customers, win market share and outperform the competition. All business-to-business market penetration falls into four distinct “Go-to-Market” Strategies—from a price-based transactional focus up to market maker partner.
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What is demand creation?
Demand creation is a deliberate process of developing new business opportunities for a specific product or service, as opposed to servicing a pre-existing need. It is a key process in revenue acceleration. Demand creation is critical to transforming an organization’s sales culture, compressing sales cycles and creating a high performance revenue generating engine.

An example of this is properly understanding and aligning the respective work of marketing and sales. Marketing is principally responsible for generating market demand on a macro level, whereas the sales individual is responsible for an account plan that generates demand within the specific account. If the two functions are not aligned, they will be less effective or even work at cross-purposes.
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What do you mean by sales and marketing alignment?
Most simply, we mean that the strategy and tactics of the sales division and the marketing division are aligned and in concert with each other. That sounds commonsense; however, in most companies this is not the case and it can be difficult to know where to start. Revenue Storm brings clarity to this question, and it starts with the Go-to-Market Strategy. Marketing is responsible for driving the supporting strategies and programs that operationalize the Go-to-Market Strategy. Sales is responsible for executing the revenue generation plan, which carries out the Go-to-Market Strategy.

Alignment is central to accelerating revenue. It is about aligning an organization’s executives, teams, decisions, processes, talent, and technology—all of the components that make up the revenue generating engine.
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Can a firm ever have more than one Go-to-Market Strategy?
Yes, but you may need a different infrastructure to support each different GTMS, so the decision to support each should be given careful consideration. If your organization has multiple revenue streams, then multiple strategies may be necessary.

Often, we find that one revenue stream calls for a low-cost, dependable, commodity-oriented Go-to-Market Strategy, while another might call for a more consultative, partnership approach.
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How is your methodology different from your competitors?
Most competitors emphasize sales training and try to improve "demand management"— sales training focused on how to ask for the sale and respond to leads/inquiries.  Some competitors have begun to use the term demand creation and other concepts we have developed. However, we believe the Revenue Storm methodology remains the most comprehensive, and continues to evolve to overcome the challenges of today’s business environment.

Revenue Storm takes a holistic management approach that centers on revenue acceleration through demand creation, touching all key functions in the enterprise. Ours is a field-proven methodology designed to accelerate revenue at today’s speed of business. We start with the end in mind and help clients create a replicable process from suspect to sale that is based on the latest research and development in the field of revenue generation.
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We have integrated another sales methodology into our sales process. Why should I consider changing?
A change in your methodology may not be needed. The Revenue Storm methodology is designed to focus on demand creation, which is exactly where most other sales methodologies stop.

Having worked with hundreds of organizations and tens of thousands of salespeople over the last 25 years, we know what’s working and what’s not. Some organizations need their revenue generating engine fine-tuned; others need it rebuilt. We work with you to build a customized solution map that supports your core objectives without forcing you to abandon what’s already working.
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Can you leader train our staff to facilitate your programs?
We understand that from time to time many training firms will certify client trainers to facilitate their programs in-house. We can certify client trainers for certain programs. However, it is important to know that training is just one piece of our revenue acceleration process, and even for training, the practical sales experience of any client trainers will be an important factor in successful execution.

Since we focus on actual revenue growth rather than simply training for training’s sake, we take this question seriously. Creating a well-aligned revenue engine that churns out revenue growth includes consultative interventions, practical coaching and ongoing analytical measurement. Support must come from experienced people who have lived and breathed a revenue acceleration approach in sales and marketing and are experienced in Revenue Storm methodologies, processes and tools. Our account teams draw from a cross-functional pool of senior marketing, sales and human resource consultants.
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How do we measure success with your methodology?
We take pride in delivering the ultimate measure of success: total revenue growth. In addition, we can work with you to define, track and measure several gauges of success that include:

  • Internal adoption of tools and processes
  • Win rates
  • Top line growth
  • Average deal size
  • Average revenue per salesperson
  • Speed to revenue

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What’s the Revenue Storm perspective on CRM (customer relationship management) or SFA (salesforce automation) applications?
Organizations that know how to build, nurture and manage customer relationships will always be a step ahead of their competition. In our experience, we’ve found that the organizations that know how to do this well, do so because it’s inherent to their culture and their processes—not because of the newest technology infrastructure.

Less than 15% of the typical CRM application’s feature set is used by the average salesperson. Our take on this is that CRM vendors know more about software engineering than they do about the sales process, and at the very least consistent strategy and coaching are essential to establish effective sales behaviors.

That said, most organizations can benefit from a technology platform to help them better organize and access their data; build and manage campaign activity; and scale new efficiencies through back office integration with a CRM platform. In today’s environment, it is important to pick a CRM application that:

  • Supports your Go-to-Market Strategy, as opposed to driving it
  • Offers high adoption rates by people who sell vs. people who manage
  • Supports a sales process vs. a linear, engineering-driven sequence of events
  • Delivers intelligence and insight versus new reporting formats

We don’t typically take a position on specific CRM or SFA installations. We’ve had successful engagements with clients using Salesforce.com, Siebel, OverQuota, Pivotal, SalesLogix and others, so we’re certainly comfortable in helping you get the most out of your technology investment.
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