By Guest Blogger: Jim Williams, Director of Product Marketing, Eloqua

While companies from various industries and sizes continue to adopt marketing automation, there is a new business category on the minds of sales and marketing professionals. It’s a unique strategy designed to help manage a company’s interactions with buyers through the entire purchase process to enable more predictable, rapid and profitable revenue growth. It’s called Revenue Performance Management (RPM).

Revenue growth is THE top concern for today’s CEO but many companies are still trying to crack the code on how to accelerate revenue. The fastest growing companies, however, have identified the drivers and impediments to revenue growth. These companies are essentially measuring these drivers and then pulling the economic levers to optimize top line growth.

RPM is an exciting next step for the sales and marketing department. It goes beyond marketing automation as a critical strategic initiative that will help grow the business. How then does marketing automation fit into the RPM landscape?

As a strategy, RPM requires the right mix of people, process and technology in order to drive real revenue growth. Marketing automation is certainly one enabling technology, but not the only. After all, businesses use all kinds of tools and services to drive revenue – from social media tracking tools to website analytics to the granddaddy of them all – sales force automation. Sharing data between these systems is a critical requirement to getting ‘one view of the truth’ that is so critical to mastering revenue predictability.

For companies that want to get the most out of their RPM strategy, having the right technology in place is a major factor. But there are others. In addition to marketing automation, companies need to invest in the right skills for their people, and most importantly, take the time to build processes that are universally accepted and adhered to.

Revenue Performance Management requires employee thinking to change. The first step in the RPM journey is this shift in thinking – not only for the marketing and sales team. The entire company needs to understand how demand generation and lead management tie closely to revenue generation.  Marketing and sales need to come together and agree on a common set of processes and procedures. This ensures everyone is speaking the same “revenue” language and that there is a shared view of the funnel – specifically, how potential buyers move through the various funnel stages.

So while we watch the increasing adoption of marketing automation, Revenue Performance Management is just on the horizon. Marketing automation should be considered an important step (along with people and processes) on the RPM journey.

Visit Bluewolf's Eloqua Consulting page to see how we can help.