RPM – Not Just Another Three Letter Acronym

Revenue Performance Management (RPM) takes CRM to the next level.

What is RPM?

Revolutions per minute? No, not in the context of Customer Relationship Management or business methodologies anyway. According to Bob Thompson at CustomerThink.com,

“RPM is a technology-enabled strategy to increase total revenue productivity. Period. It’s not any more complicated than that.”

RPM gives your business an overview into its overall revenue productivity. Unlike traditional metrics available through CRM, finance and ERP systems, which focus on particular departments or business units, RPM looks at the effect of joined-up sales and marketing efforts on the company as a whole.

Breaking the barriers between departments

Despite efforts to create “joined-up” business, most departments retain their own data stores or “silos”. Some software platforms allow data sharing between a couple of departments, but RPM seeks to completely demolish internal barriers between sales and marketing in its goal of total transparency, creating a seamless team.

At the same time, RPM methodology allows each department to focus on its own responsibilities.

“When marketing takes a larger share of responsibility for pipeline generation and uses lead nurturing and lead scoring to help sales focus on the hottest leads and opportunities, it frees sales to focus time on productive activities such as selling.” Jason Miller – Marketo.

More than just CRM software

Although CRM software plays its part, RPM goes beyond software.

“Revenue Performance Management is a set of ideas about how companies can grow and accelerate revenue growth by taking advantage of these very broad changes in the way buying and selling takes place in our economy.” – Phil Fernandez, “Revenue Disruption”.

What can RPM do for my business?

Despite being a relatively new kid on the block, RPM is already turning out some impressive statistics:

• Companies employing RPM achieve (on average) 102% of their revenue target. Businesses employing other techniques achieved 76% of their targets.
• Companies employing RPM close 40% of their sales qualified leads. Non-RPM businesses managed just 25%.
• Sales staff spend 72% of their time actually selling, in organisations where RPM is used. Elsewhere, the proportion of time spent selling averages at 57% as the boundaries between sales and marketing are blurred.

Source: 2012 Marketo RPM Benchmark Survey

Where do I start?

There are a number of issues to consider when creating your own RPM strategy, but the key question to answer is:

“What are the best practices of the companies which demonstrate the highest growth and most productive revenue engines?”

Answer that, and your business is well on the way to leveraging Revenue Performance Management for enhanced profit and greater efficiency.