3 Steps to Win, Retain and Grow Revenue Simple things like teaming up with clients to brainstorm ideas and streamlining your bidding process can boost your bottom line.
By Alastair Mitchell Edited by Dan Bova
Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
By rethinking your approach to winning and managing accounts, you can stimulate company-wide growth and a subsequent increase in revenue. Who wouldn't want that? The following are three main approaches to help you achieve this:
1. Bring your customers into your workflow.
External collaboration happens when you team up with your clients to share ideas and connect with outside professionals for groundbreaking results. That means more ideas all around, and the benefits of external collaboration are major.
By bringing your customers into the workflow, you're not only reducing the potential for version control issues, you're harnessing more brain power and more ideas. That means you'll likely be able to reach creative solutions faster than you would have without external collaboration.
Overall, external collaboration can lead to improved relationships with your clients through a compelling, differentiated and more collaborative working relationship. It's a win-win.
Related: 3 Reasons Why Partnerships Need to be Part of Your Growth Strategy
2. Streamline processes, submit more bids, bring in more revenue.
How an organization approaches bid management is vital to the success of any business. When done correctly, you can perfectly balance your budget and scale to meet your needs.
To make the most of bid management, streamline your processes with a single platform where teams can collaborate and share information, not only internally, but with potential customers as well. This not only increases the speed with which you can submit bids, it results in an easily audit-able document and bid submission.
Know when to step in. Just because something's automated doesn't mean it's right. Sometimes you need to double check and make sure everything is running smoothly and avoid your bids growing too high.
In the end, when you can execute faster and deliver more compelling bid responses, you'll walk away with higher win rates and better results for both your firm and your clients.
Related: 5 Steps to Build a Million-Dollar Business in One Year
3. It's not all about revenue.
How you handle accounts can make or break your business relationships -- and ultimately your bottom line. That's why it's not surprising that 60 percent of executives feel that they can rely on strategic accounts to generate at least one quarter of their revenue. But, it's not all about revenue. Even though 77 percent select their strategic accounts based on revenue, the majority of the top 10 percent of successful businesses instead rely on gross profit.
The Parpeto Principal has the potential to dramatically grow your business, but that's only half of the equation. The other half is how to retain these accounts after you've won. Collaboration and visibility are key here.
A major component of achieving these two things is a shared space where companies can not only work together with their clients, but also provide transparency into account activity and planning. This means increased productivity, improved customer buy-in and trust. Improved efficiency and higher overall client satisfaction aside, these tactics are critical at a time of increasingly mobile and dispersed teams.
By utilizing these three steps, you can earn, keep and increase revenue to help grow your organization.
Related: 3 Webinars to Grow Your Business
