WHY DO YOU NEED CONSULTING HELP?

You probably already know the reason but have wondered about the real benefits. Consultants typically have a fresh perspective and already know your markets. They understand your issues but also drive you to transformational changes you won’t make yourself. You might eventually get to changes on your own, but without people skilled in transformational change, it can take too long and you lose precious momentum needed to meet your goals. Consultants can also quickly take you to another level of performance by seeing unique issues and recommending incremental changes. A good consultant should speak and perform in terms of “Incremental Improvement”.

• Incremental Revenue

• Incremental Revenue Growth

• Incremental Market Share

• Incremental Margin

You can generally benefit from consulting help – but the benefits you receive depend on the consulting firm you hire.

WHY SHOULD YOU WANT CEVOH?

CEVOH is a boutique firm with an exclusive focus on revenue growth. We are small, focused and personal. First of all, we never charge to learn your business. We show up with a solid understanding of the industry, the markets and your company. We will explore your data and sit in on some key meetings to hear more about the issues you are having. We often do this for free as well. Our role is to recommend and help you implement key revenue initiatives that really work. To do this, we want to know as much as we can - and it’s just not fair to make you pay to educate us. This is completely different than how most consulting firms work. Second, we will want to evaluate and appraise your current situation - including how well poised you are to grow revenue. We sometimes (often) do this for free as well. The benefit to us is to get a clear assessment of the revenue climate in your organization. We find that when we charge for this - we don’t always get full cooperation or objective answers to our assessment tools.

The free stuff:

• Exploring your data

• Sit in on key meetings

• Get to know you

• Evaluate your current situation

• Appraise and score your revenue growth potential

Third - we will charge you for the work product we provide. You will think the prices are fair and you will be happy with the results. It’s true that we may push you, pull you, and ask “why not”. But we will get YOU results. We guarantee this.

HOW CEVOH IS DIFFERENT FROM OTHER CONSULTING FIRMS:

• We don’t charge you to learn your business

• We facilitate, interview and score powerful revenue assessments - for free

• We are small, focused and personal

• We provide exceptional value – often doing pro bono work in your industry, perhaps for you as well     

• We contribute day one

• We develop revenue strategies that are innovative

• We develop revenue strategies based on proven established principles

• We jump start innovation that is strategic

• We aren’t afraid to implement

• We provide pinpoint accurate initiatives to assess your current efforts and recommend incremental revenue ideas

• We do this in a thoughtful way that helps you exploit the market

• We offer a performance guarantee

Affiliations?

Here’s a pragmatic way to think about revenue consulting, starting with 7 Revenue Consulting Projects You Should Want.

A good revenue consulting firm should be able to provide quick results for you. To start your discussions, here are 7 ways to get a quick ROI from a revenue consulting engagement.

A REVENUE Tune-UP

A revenue tune-up is more about smaller improvements. A Tune up will reaffirm what customers want and need and help you recognize important trends before your competitors do. A consulting firm will Interview key customers and mine social sentiment, drawing out finer points that don’t show in research. They will put this together with customer ratings, net promoter and the moving parts of the marketplace to clarify revenue opportunities. Baseline industry metrics will be brought in and compared to those of your company. The trends in the marketplace are critical to identify as these can showcase competitor movement and disruptive technologies that will create risk and opportunities for you. All of this trended, comparative information will be provided in ‘at-a-glance’ summaries to get your team aligned. Trained consultants will then objectively assess your offering against value and margin standards and against the competition. Finally, a tune-up will appraise your current growth initiatives to see if there are smaller changes that will improve their performance. The idea of a tune-up is to gain important and relatively smaller incremental revenue gains. Done frequently, a tune-up engagement from CEVOH will help you stay on track and can be a quick way to ensure you make your revenue goals. 

Polish for your Strategy and Planning efforts

A strategy and planning engagement will help you dramatically lean forward. This project is typically more transformational than a tune-up. Even in highly successful companies, we find that everyday tasks, quarterly goals and calendarized cadences prevent continuous improvements in strategy and planning. We will work with your team to outline a five-year strategic plan to maximize equity and build value. Without continuous focus on equity development, incremental value creation, strategy and planning, you will miss important market trends, and risk encountering a significant revenue gap in the stat plan. By adding value measurements and equity evaluations in the plan, you will focus on key performance drivers, or forward indicators. This may sound difficult but a skilled revenue consulting firm can help you with this. CEVOH measures and trends value metrics at the individual customer level and also at a macro company level. We have seen many strategic plans that show incremental revenue growth goals – while the company is seeing a decline in customer value. Essential Advice: Want to improve your strategy? Improve your incremental value creation. We have specific strategic initiatives in place designed to build incremental customer value.

Another key component of strategy and planning is enhancing the success of your mergers and acquisitions. CEVOH can identify approach and coordinate M&A activity that enhances your strategy and dramatically improves revenue growth.

CEVOH also has experience in developing optimal contemporary business models to improve your revenues and margins. We will work with your team to outline a five-year strategic plan to maximize equity, and along the way – explore improvements in the business model.. Wholesale, Retail, Public, Private, Not for Profit. There are many different traditional business models in the market and some emerging ones for most every industry. How do your competitors make money? Where is the market moving? With disruptive forces always in play, your business model may need a refresh. We scan and capture best practices and case studies from around the globe to explore innovative business model approaches. For example, we have experience introducing service models inside a product model environment.

create more value

We are a huge advocate of value. Understanding value, measuring value and creating value are the keys to any revenue growth effort. Value can be scientifically defined and calculated – but sometimes this gets so complicated it’s hard to tackle.  We can simplify the confusion and clarify the steps needed to add value. Think of value as another metric of business equity.

CEVOH will certainly try to bring some science into the equations, so the parts get enough focus and incremental improvement can be measured – but we balance this to try to simplify along the way.  

As customers and the buying process becomes more sophisticated, (and your offering gets more complex), value will become different by customer segment. Segment differences also include customer demographics, psychographics, and spending habits. Value can differ by type of customer as well. Different types of customers include the user, buyer, buyer teams, and influencers. We typically see these segments as having different needs, desires and motivations - - and it’s important to continue to create incremental value for each.

It can be a daunting task to try to identify, clarify and build incremental value for all these segments – but CEVOH can help you. We will clarify the customer needs for each; grouping and simplifying these to fit the current offering. Once the needs and desires are clarified, a significant effort may be warranted to improve incremental value. As a few examples, here are some proven techniques to improve incremental value for many organizations:

• Increase focus on the end-user and not just the buyer. In cases where they are different, use pull tactics – When you meet the end-user needs, they will influence or ‘pull’ thru the purchase. In contrast, many organizations only use push tactics targeting the buyer.

• Build or improve products to generate powerful utility. Products that work well, are dependable and meet the basic needs are among the highest rated by users and buyers.

• Build future promise into your offering. This can include exemplary customer care and service, or, it can also include the panache or appeal of buying from you. CEVOH can help you explore many other ways to improve the future promise value proposition.

• Improve UI/UX. The last frontier for many products and services is to make them easier to use, more fun to interact with, more beautiful, elegant and desired.

• Revisit your pricing and discounting strategies. Many organizations are discounting too much and this actually can cloud the value equation. Pricing should be set properly to reflect the value – then discounts should only be awarded for specific customer behavior such as trial, increased spending/volume and retention. No other initiative can improve incremental value results and revenue growth as quickly as the right pricing initiatives. And, we believe pricing can only be discussed in tandem with value.

We realize all this sounds simple and it’s not – clarifying customer needs, measuring you progress to satisfy these and building initiatives to increase incremental value – this is the foundation to any successful organization.  CEVOH can help you build this foundation, creating incremental value so you extract revenue from this value.

rebuild your revenue growth plans

Another transformational project is to rebuild your growth plans. CEVOH builds revenue growth plans and go-to-market action plans that are co-owned by sales, marketing and product fulfillment/operations departments. We prefer to use our proprietary 9 P revenue plan. Our revenue plan includes marketing, sales and go-to-market plans that are aligned and clarify actions needed to meet the needs of your highest impact customers. Get the CEVOH Revenue Plan template.  A few of the special distinctions of our plans include:

• We facilitate the integration and alignment of various internal departments. We encourage inclusion and use of a signature/concurrence page for every plan built.

• The 9 P plan includes sections on building incremental value. In addition to Product, Price, Position (channels) and Promotion, we include:

  • People – the magic of any revenue plan

  • Process – this represents the buying experience

  • Profit – this is where incremental value gets tied to profit and company equity

  • Physical Environment – this is where the products/services are presented and sold

  • Productivity – fulfillment promise and a list of things to stop doing

• Our approach includes special sections on positioning products and services with customers including the USP (Unique Selling Proposition)

• We identify any Incremental resources that might be needed to properly execute an incremental revenue plan. In turn, we also help you identify projects you can discontinue – to free up resources.

We believe that Consulting is about Foresight

It’s about anticipating the moves of your competitors - and it’s about outlining countermeasures to offset perceived strengths of your adversaries. But spy vs spy will only get you so far. It is also important to drive to authentic solutions. Solutions that your customers and employees will admire, respect and buy. Essential Advice: Create the most-clear and discriminating product and service values for your company. And then weaponize this into a powerful revenue plan to win market share.

innovate to accelerate revenue growth

From our experience with best practice companies, substantial revenue is generated from effective innovation. Depending on the industry, from 2-15% of revenue is generated from truly transformational innovation. And, up to 55% of revenue is generated from adjacent innovation. A revenue consulting firm can help you innovate to accelerate new products and services. Consultants will use all techniques possible including red tide, blue ocean, customer panels, cross departmental ideation, UI/UX workshops, trained brains, innovation labs, crowdsourcing and skunkworks. Sometimes it takes hard work to be innovative and you need outside inspiration. So often, when working on big projects and difficult goals, it’s necessary to seek inspiration. Inspiration can come from some common and uncommon sources:

• Examine your culture including your values. Do you embrace an innovative culture? Are there things you can do to crowdsource innovation from within – by changing the values and rewards structure of your people assets?

• Form a Black-Hat, or Red-Team to counter your current efforts (or upcoming product launch) and ask challenging questions from both a competitor and customer viewpoint. An outside firm is best at this. Essential Advice: Anticipate the competitor moves to every move you make – a common mistake is to think they are staid, when in fact the competitors are constantly moving and reacting to you. From this you will create additional innovative ideas.

• Consider organizing company resources to match the value chain. You may already be doing this – or you may have a few missing steps that will make all the difference and give you some quick innovative ideas.

• Embrace disruptive technology and consider ways to improve your customers lives with tech solutions.

• Hire a design firm to enhance the beauty, functionality and UI/UX of your current product line, from this you will certainly obtain some really innovative ideas.

• Organize around customers rather than around products. You can do this for a day, a week or permanently; even as an exercise you will find some innovative ideas peeking thru.

• Hold innovative or ideation session designed specifically to build incremental customer value. Start with mature core products as an adjacent innovation focus, and move to transformational innovation ways to increase value – even it if means replacing your core products.

• Hire a revenue consulting firm like CEVOH to jumpstart your ideation and innovation efforts.

In business, we often get bogged down by patterns or cadences. While cadences can be powerful for business, they can also stifle innovation. Innovation can be defined as a new and better way of answering a question, or solving a problem. Sometimes it’s hard to come up with insightful solutions to a difficult challenge. Even when you see the challenge coming, you still need some help to get inspired and find innovative solutions. CEVOH can help you with inspiration and creativity, ideas and innovation.

optimize the offerings

While it sounds like a very logical idea, continuous improvements to optimize your offerings can be difficult. Sometimes an outside firm is needed to help your product management/operations team. Using a SWOT to establish features, benefits and discriminators of all your products/services as well the competition will be very valuable. This tool alone is a great way to start to improve your offerings.

Perhaps even more valuable is a CEVOH project to establish the current value and margin of all your products and services. The clear benefits of this are:

• Optimized portfolio management – only the best products should be offered; establishing a baseline of value and margin will ensure the best products are what get offered to the customer – and the highest margin products are getting focus by precious internal resources

• Proactively migrating customers from lower value products to the newer better value products as they come online. This is a favorite of customers – they are beginning to expect this approach from best in class companies. If you are not currently doing this, we can help you do it without putting revenue or margin at risk.

• Consistently practice establishing a USP (unique selling proposition) for each product. If the USP doesn’t make sense, causes many questions, or cannot be said during an elevator ride – best to rethink that product offer.

• Optimize Price as a reflection of value – Once value is established, pricing is the mechanism for turning the value into revenue and margin. We live in an environment where price discounts, incentives and special offers are prevalent. While we have come to expect this – we also will pay fair prices for products that perform as expected, present a future value promise and where we are treated well after the money is spent.

• Limit discounting to reward specific customer behavior – while many techniques have been tried, there is significant proof to suggest that limiting discounts for these behaviors is optimal:

  • Trial – where you encourage a customer to try something

  • Increase spending and volume purchases – a discount can be applied to encourage a customer to buy more, but you must assure this is not simply bringing sales forward across the calendar line

  • Retention – along with key customer care approaches, a discount can be applied in some industries to encourage retention. Typically, these are applied in annuity or recurring spend situations.

We specialize in developing demand-driven product strategies that maximize our clients’ growth and profitability. We help each client think differently by looking at their business through the eyes of the customer rather than looking at the customer through the eyes of the business. We can show you how to increase customer value in your offerings to optimize revenue and margin. Here is a summary of the approaches we use:

• We can help you migrate revenue from mature products to new ones – without losing margin

• We can help you extract revenue from customer value using product and pricing

• We can help you know where demand is headed before it’s reflected in the market

• We can help you stop doing what your customers won’t pay for

• Use CEVOH to help you optimize a planned launch or relaunch for maximum market affect.

• Use CEVOH to reinvigorate brands and build transformative products

• We can articulate what differentiates your products/ services from those of your competitors and help you communicate these in your marketing efforts.

• We can help you develop value measurements and margin metrics for every product or service you offer.

CEVOH has an exclusive focus on growth. The product offering is a key way to generate growth. We will show you how to proactively optimize the portfolio – eliminating underperforming products and services.

improve sales team performance

We will encourage you to align your sales channels with how customers want to buy and with their purchasing power. This includes field sales, inside/tele, customer care upsell, partner sales and e-sales channels.

A significant way to improve results is to improve sales team performance. Not an easy task for some groups to do internally. An outside firm can help bring best practices from other similar sales environments and help you prioritize efforts on the most viable revenue lift opportunities. For example, many studies have shown that a large sales team can be easily broken into three parts. Highest performers, lowest performers and middle performers. Retaining, and paying high performers is a proven tactic that requires some special skills. Capturing their approaches is sometimes difficult and hard to transfer – this tier can be successful anywhere, and they are protective of their unique skills. CEVOH has these skills. Lowest tier performers are the hardest to improve as many things are causing this. It’s often not a best practice to spend much additional resources on improving that tier. It’s the middle tier that has the most opportunity. Sometimes this group is struggling with the order process, there may be fighting for account ownership, or, the compensation plan may not optimally be structured to encourage their performance. There are many things that are needed to work in synch to ensure the highest performance for this critical tier. Generally, a bell curve will define a typical sales team, and the middle tier has the largest numbers, and largest opportunities for improvement. These improvements will also have the largest cumulative impact for the organization. And there are several contemporary sales models we can discuss that will improve customer incremental value and ultimately revenue performance. We are currently working with large distributed sales organization to create rep franchises – an innovative way to improve customer experience and lower cost of sales.

We analyze high-performer behaviors to build competency models of the required skills for different roles. These models are fundamental to recruitment, promotion, and development efforts.

We are advocates of a structured coaching culture that builds and sustains skills. All managers should be held accountable for coaching frequency, time, and quality.

We help meaningfully differentiate high performers, ensuring broad demonstration of such behaviors. Rewards and consequences for following these performance standards are fair and clear.

We also understand that not all companies need a large number of salespeople. A handful of skilled Business Development employees can be optimal. We understand the difference between BD and sellers. We embrace the longer sales cycles resident in an optimal BD function. Here’s a controversial idea – reconsider your CRM system and how it may be affecting sales team moral. We talk to quite a few sales reps that hate the CRM system and how it impacts their ability to connect with the customer. We can help you revise your CRM approaches so that they provide value to your business and to your customers

We bring years of innovative ideas and practical experience to your business. We do this with proven approaches that provide thought leadership, candid counselling, and team guidance. If change is recommended, we do this with sensitivity to the risk/reward equations and the impact to customers, the firm and the employees. We will work to leverage every existing initiative. We add thought leadership, ideas and work product. Lots of work product. Our goal is a solid partnership of listening from you and providing constructive advice with your teams.

A Firm With Intellectual Capital.

We have developed a unique breadth of experience that fosters new insight and drives our demand strategies. We have tested and refined our proprietary methodologies for more than 30 years.

Projects Led by Experienced, Senior Consultants.

Our teams are staffed and led by senior individuals who are actively involved throughout the projects they lead.

We Provide Actionable Recommendations and Detailed Implementation Blueprints.

We go beyond strategic recommendations to develop clear, actionable programs that are tailored to your business capabilities and resources. We partner with clients from strategy to execution to ensure successful implementations.

Hire CEVOH for Consistent Results.

We have a track record of creating opportunities for profitable growth across a wide range of categories—even in categories where growth is flat or declining.