Revenue opportunity is rarely sitting in one obvious place. It may be inside an underperforming service line, an existing account with whitespace, a slow proposal process or a technical capability customers do not fully understand.
Sometimes the most important commercial signal is not that the business is shrinking. It is that growth has become uneven. One part of the portfolio may be accelerating while another region, market or offering is losing momentum, and its growth is decelerating or falling short of plan.
That is when the job stops being “sell harder” and becomes “understand why.”
You find those answers by talking to the people who see different parts of the business and you LISTEN.
- Business development sees emerging markets, unmet needs and where the competition has a stranglehold.
- Sales understands existing accounts.
- Technical teams know where the company is differentiated.
- Finance sees the economics and margins.
- Proposal teams know what the market will allow and where opportunities become difficult to win.
- Operations knows what can be delivered successfully, safely and on time.
And frankly, listening to cross-functional teams isn’t just about passively meeting the team or being nice. It is the initial part of a rigorous, data-driven diagnostic process to find commercial, competitive and operational gaps.
Then you compare that internal picture with what the market is telling you.
BCG describes successful growth transformation as requiring “data-driven planning, stress testing, smart sequencing, and persistence.”
Before looking for the next big growth engine, you need to understand the one you already have. Where are we winning? Where are we losing? Which capabilities create measurable value? Where are margins strongest? What are customers asking for that we are not providing? Where has the market moved faster than we have?
McKinsey senior partner Jill Zucker put a number behind that thinking after research involving 4,000 companies: “Around 80 percent of growth comes from maximizing the value of the core, but 20 percent of growth comes from other pathways.”
The answer may be a different buying journey, value proposition, market or commercial approach. But you cannot prescribe the answer before you understand the whole picture.
You don’t walk in with a revenue strategy.
YOU BUILD ONE.