How High Tech CEOs Can Grow Revenues Using a Revenue Capture Scorecard

How High Tech CEOs Can Grow Revenues Using aRevenue Capture ScorecardAccelerating Growth Using a Premeditated, Planned Process

A Value Forward ® White Paper

ContentsExecutive Summary ........................................... 2

Best Practices Needed To Grow Your High Tech Business ............................................ 3

Knowledge Needed For Prospects to Buy .............................................................. 3

Knowledge Needed to Sell and Market IT .. 4

The Best Practice Needed To Be Implemented Today For Success ................. 5

Revenue Capture Is A Company Responsibility...Not Just The Sales Teams! .. 6

Revenue Capture Is An Integrated Process ....6

4 Reasons Why Most IT Businesses Fail to Build a Scalable Revenue Capture Program Consistently Year After Year ......... 7

What Is The Revenue Capture Scorecard® ... 9

Conclusion ....................................................... 10

Executive SummaryStrategy Without Execution or a Planned Process Is Wasted Thought!

Success in the high tech industry is an ever-changing roadmap that must be proactively managed by best practices, thought leadership and the implementation of business operating metrics that are measured.

Success is today’s economy requires a planned process that focuses on execution.

Success is defined by Merriam-Webster’s dictionary as “a: degree or measure of succeeding; b: favorable or desired outcome; also: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.” This definition clearly characterizes what most CEOs of privately held and public high tech companies seek in their role as the senior business executive in charge. The combination of using measurement, attaining a defined outcome and creating wealth is the foundation of any successful business growth system. Why start an IT company without being successful or creating wealth? Why seek success without having a defined outcome or a measurable process?

Yes, strategy is important but without execution, it is wasted thought. Great

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technology ideas are everywhere, but how often are these opportunities implemented using a premeditated approach that maximizes the concepts’ potential for profit and success?

To be a successful IT company, execution is more important than just a great idea. Steve Jobs, former CEO and Founder of Apple, did not invent the PC, portable music headset or cell phone but he implemented his unique design and marketing fusion approach to product delivery and became a billionaire. Marc Benioff, CEO and Founder of Salesforce.com, did not invent the concept of capturing and managing customer data for marketing purposes. He just executed his business plan better. Yet, Twitter CEO and Founder Evan Williams has a great idea too, but so far, no profits.

By reading this white paper, you will learn specific strategic and tactical action steps to analyze your current operational process, techniques to manage your department systems, and methodologies to increase marketing success and corporate profits. The outlined action steps provide a blueprint to examine where you are and where you want to be to achieve your high tech success objectives.

Best Practices Needed To Grow Your High Tech BusinessTo grow an IT company organically at the lowest revenue capture cost, CEOs must set aside their own experiences and understand their buyers’ objectives based on research and communicate in a format that targeted buyers can understand and respond too.

When designing a scalable business model, create drivers that focus on the buyer’s needs… not yours. Your development costs, G & A overhead or your sales cycle length are all irrelevant to the buyer you are trying to induce to take an action step to buy.

To grow your technology, software or professional service business, you must manage the intersection of the knowledge needed to understand why your prospects buy (or don’t buy) from you and the knowledge needed to sell and market to your prospects.

Knowledge Needed For Prospects to Buy

To get buyers to buy, you must analyze why they buy and integrate those answers into your business revenue capture process and operating models. In today’s economic market, there are five reasons why prospects buy IT – only five.

© 2013 Paul R. DiModica 3

They are:

1. How does your high tech product or service increase income for the buyer (business-to-business market)

2. How does your high tech product or service decrease expenses for the buyer (business-to-business market)

3. How does your high tech offering manage the buyer’s risks or business consequences (business-to-business market)

4. How does your high tech offering make the buyer become more agile in their business process (business-to-business market)

5. How does your high tech offering make the buyer feel good (business-to-consumer market)

Knowledge Needed to Sell and Market IT

When building out your strategic positioning, pricing schedules, marketing methodology, financial investment benchmarks and sales process, three questions need to be answered:

1. Why would prospects buy from me?

2. Why would prospects not buy from me?

3. How do I create value that prospects believe?

When these strategic eight questions are answered correctly, they create a symbiotic foundation on how to grow revenues in an IT firm.


If you are a senior executive of a privately held or publicly funded IT firm, you have a fiduciary responsibility to understand the answers to these questions and how they should be used as revenue capture tools for all of your departments to operate correctly.

When answering these questions, you cannot just use generic or perceived responses—you must focus on researched data. You must be

specific. If you don’t know, then you need to do some discovery to determine the exact answers.

Once you have this data, you then need to integrate the answers into your marketing message, your sales process, your financial business model, your customer service and operational departments design, and your overall corporate strategy and your brand positioning.

The Best Practice Needed To Be Implemented Today For Success

The best practices for you to grow your technology or professional service company is managing the intersection of these eight questions and their answers to build a replicable and scalable business revenue capture model.

When the correct answers to these eight questions are determined, you can create the building blocks of recurring revenue capture. Inaccurate answers for these questions based on gut feel, department manager perceptions and aged market research force management teams to make incorrect business decisions and investments in sales, marketing, corporate strategy, financial budget models and funding allocations.


Revenue Capture Is A Company Responsibility… Not Just The Sales Teams!

It is easy to blame salespeople when they don’t hit their assigned sales quota. And yes, they are responsible. Yet most technology and professional service companies incorrectly calculate the firm’s sales quota. Sales quota accuracy is the company key performance indicator (K.P.I.) that the rest of the firm operates from. When your sales quota is incorrectly calculated, it affects your marketing budgets, your IT staff bench utilization rates, your engineering and development department

costs, your cash flow, your corporate general and administrative (G&A) costs, and your operating margins.

High tech firms organizationally operate like an assembly line with multiple moving gears

and levers working in tandem simultaneously. When the machinery system slows down or does not function correctly, the whole production system fails.

Revenue Capture Is An Integrated Process

Why is the sales team responsible if there is no market demand for your offering?

Why is the sales team responsible for bad customer service and support?

Why is the sales team responsible if the offering is incorrectly priced?

Why is the sales team responsible if a new software application is released too early?

Why is the sales team responsible if your professional services project team or applications do not work as marketed?

Why is the sales team responsible when the marketing department does not generate any qualified leads?

Why is the sales team responsible if you are selling blue shoes to a red shoe market?

In today’s operating environment, if your revenue and profits are down, or your current market growth is not hitting your projections,


it is the company’s responsibility… not just the sales team’s responsibility.

To maximize your high tech revenue, you must integrate your strategy, marketing, sales and finance into one outbound revenue capture program where all departments are focused on the corporate goal of accelerated growth.

Today’s Economic Environment Holds No Mercy For Any High Tech Business That Makes Mistakes

Today, managing a privately-held family business or a corporate conglomerate is a challenging career choice fraught with financial risks, legal issues, extensive stress, difficult business decisions, and sometimes upset family members.

The world is full of great new technology ideas, extensively documented new business approaches and detailed reports on what you should do to increase your IT business success, but without action, why waste your time.

4 Reasons Why Most IT Businesses Succeed Year After Year

Since 2001, we have been compiling a best practices analysis of hundreds of technology, software and professional service firms we have worked with and have identified four

specific business drivers that help high tech firms grow top line revenues.

Growing a high tech business is not easy. But, there are four proven factors that are currently working in today’s economic environment you can use to create a success framework that will move your organization’s performance to increased growth.

They are:

1. Understand that revenue capture is a company responsibility.

2. Don’t sell and market your IT offering; instead sell the business results it creates for the buyer.

3. Always manage your entire business by metrics. Sales, marketing, operations, finance and customer service departments can all be a planned, measured process.

4. Manage your business model process professionally. Professionally managed business processes operate proactively not reactively. The difference between a professionally managed business process and an entrepreneurially managed business process is metrics and planning.


Another lesson learned through our best practice research is that:

In IT, your “intellectual property” is not your technology—it is the strength of your revenue capture distribution.

IT companies often are led by management teams who are technically trained. Having great technology means nothing, if you cannot market, distribute and sell the technology. Why did IBM buy Price Waterhouse? As a $100 billion company, they could have started an accounting advisory group and taken market share. Instead, they bought a distribution channel that was already in place. Why did Larry Ellison buy PeopleSoft? His army of staff programmers and aggressive salespeople could have built the product and captured market share without paying a premium valuation, but it was easier to buy the distribution channel and market share – than build it.

To expand your current high tech company, you must focus at least equally (if not more) on how your offering is going to be marketed, sold and distributed. Without distribution . . . all you have is a great idea and an IT offering that prospects cannot buy.

In high tech, good quality is good enough.

This theorem appears to contradict a common perception by technology-driven firms that the best technology always increases revenues—but the world is full of failed IT companies who had great technology. The intellectual property of IT companies today is not IT—it is the strength of your strategy, marketing, sales process, and distribution.

The Revenue Capture Scorecard® - Driving Business Growth Through Metrics, Planning and Best Practices

To grow IT businesses, the executive management team needs to integrate strategy, marketing, sales and financial management into one outbound revenue capture program. The business success tool to accomplish this objective is the Revenue Capture Scorecard®.


What Is The Revenue Capture Scorecard®

It is estimated that over 70% of the Global 1000 public companies use a Balanced Scorecard strategy in some format in all or in parts of their operating business units. But after being exposed to this scorecard methodology as the Vice President of Strategy Worldwide for Renaissance Worldwide (the company that acquired the Balanced Scorecard consulting firm by book author David Norton), I found an operational success gap in the Balanced Scorecard approach of how to make a company successful.

The Revenue Capture Scorecard® goes beyond the original Balanced Scorecard concept. The foundational concept of the Balanced Scorecard is that management must align the four business process perspectives of Customers, Learning and Growth, Financial, and Internal Business Process to improve operational performance.

From my experiences as a vice president of sales, marketing, strategy, and operations in different technology companies at different times, I knew that having great IT development and engineering departments meant nothing if you could not create a revenue distribution model that was scalable and successful.

The Balanced Scorecard concept has tremendous merit, scholarship, and case studies behind it on why it works for well-established, large conglomerates—who are seeking to increase their business infrastructure management performance. But to use it as a tool to increase revenue growth is suspect, at best, for large companies and fails to address the needs of small to midsized companies (IT and otherwise) on how to build a replicable and scalable revenue capture program.

In business:

PR is not revenue.

Marketing is not revenue.

Advertising is not revenue.

Branding is not revenue.

Development is not revenue.

Revenue is revenue.

So, taking my experiences based on my business success model development and assessing the analytical concepts and success gaps of the Balanced Scorecard, I created a new process we call the “Revenue Capture Scorecard®.”

High tech CEOs and senior business executives seeking to grow their top line revenues and increase success must integrate marketing,


sales, financial management, and strategy to maximize business growth.

Holistic, Sustainable Growth Only Comes From A Corporate Commitment To An Integrated Revenue Capture Process

You cannot run a high tech business on assumptions. You need to know the specific reasons why prospects buy and do not buy and then integrate this information vertically into every department’s approach and make it their operational DNA. Accept that you do not sell IT products or services—rather you sell the results produced by your technology offering or the protection from business consequences or risks.

ConclusionAligning the departments of sales, marketing, strategy and finance into a revenue capture program is a key business driver needed to create a scalable business growth model in today’s changing economic environment. Without a dedicated effort in this direction, IT company revenue growth becomes a decentralized process where departments operate as silos without best practice measurement or action step leadership.

High tech business success is a premeditated process based on knowledge, execution and measurement. To facilitate the desired business outcome of accelerated growth, high tech firms must complete a 360° analysis of their current business revenue capture model and buyer driver and build a metric-driven planned process.

Companies that adopt this measured approach will seize the opportunity and create an agile revenue growth position—that is sustainable in any economic market.

About The AuthorPaul DiModica is the founder and CEO of Value Forward Group, a high tech revenue capture specialist advisement, M&A and management consulting firm. Paul is also editor of the IT sales, strategy and marketing strategy newsletter called HighTechSuccess read by high tech executives in over 110 countries worldwide (www.hightechsuccess.com).

Additionally, he is the author of the books High Tech CEO Business Success Strategies, How to Sell Technology® and his new book the Revenue Capture Scorecard®.

Prior to launching the Value Forward Group in 2001, Paul spent over 20 years in high tech businesses as a Senior Vice President


of Sales and Marketing, Vice President of Strategy Worldwide (Renaissance Worldwide Inc.), Vice President of Operations, Chief Operating Officer and company founder in private, family-run and public IT companies with annual revenues up to $900 million.

Paul has been featured or interviewed in hundreds of media outlets including the New York Times, Investors Daily, Fox News, Selling Power Magazine, Sales and Marketing Magazine, CIO Magazine, CFO Magazine, Entrepreneur Magazine, Training Magazine, Marketing Magazine, Computer World Magazine, Entrepreneur Radio, Chicago Tribune, Executive Travel Magazine, Value Added Partners and many others.

About Value Forward GroupThe Value Forward Group is a high tech business success advisement consulting firm. We focus on helping CEOs, company founders and senior executive team members of technology, software and professional service companies maximize revenue, increase marketing success, reduce operating expenses and build a replicable and scalable revenue capture process that gives them a competitive edge. For more information about Value Forward programs and services, please contact:

Paul DiModica770-632-7647pdimodica@valueforward.comwww.valueforward.com


Kickstart Your Revenue Generation ProgramAre you looking to increase your success in today’s sales and marketing environment?Identifying prospective buyers, understanding the forces that drive them to buy and communicating your value requires a company core competencies analysis, business model financial calculation, sales and marketing framework development, and a premeditated plan to maximize your firm’s success.

Value Forward Group can help you increase your success in selling to businesses or government entities using best practices, research and execution. At the Value Forward Group, we understand today’s market and can work with you to put a success plan together.

Call today to discuss how we can help you plan your strategy to reach your goals.

770-632-7647 www.PaulDiModica.com

How High Tech CEOs Can Grow Revenues Using a Revenue Capture Scorecard

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