Break Through Your Topline Revenue Glass Ceiling!

Are you frustrated because you can break through your revenue glass ceiling?

Maybe you want to grow through $1 million in top-line revenue, $5 million, or even $50 million. But you’re unable to sustain a level of revenue generation from which to grow your business.

2-steps forward, 2-steps backward

Maybe you get close, and then you fall back. It’s very frustrating.

In this article, I will give three common reasons this could be happening, and then I will give you one of my favorite actionable tools that you can use today to begin to get you to the next level.

Reason #1: Wearing Too Many Hats & A Lack of Resources

Most businesses have resource issues, but this is often a huge obstacle to sustained revenue generation for small and medium-sized businesses.

It’s not uncommon for the person who is responsible for revenue generation, i.e., sales and business development, to also be the person who is responsible for service delivery or another crucial aspect of running the business.

They are wearing too many hats, which translates to a lack of human capital, which prevents you from scaling the business appropriately.

Let’s say you’re a larger small or middle-market company, and you don’t have this issue, but you may have misallocated resources.

For example, your VP of Sales and Marketing is busy hiring and training new salespeople but lacks the time or the resources to spend on the marketing end of the business, which means that your lead generation engine isn’t running.

Even if you’ve outsourced your marketing to a third party, the lack of oversight is causing the lead generation activities to fall flat. So, the resources you have aren’t being well spent.

Questions to ask

Questions that you might want to ask yourself are:

• What resources do I have?
• How are they being allocated?
• Do I have the correct resources to help me scale the business appropriately in order to break through the revenue glass ceiling?

Reason #2: No or Too Few Processes

Another key reason you may not have sustainable revenue growth is due to a lack of processes.  

Think about your process from lead generation to onboarding and customer care.

Questions to ask

Questions you may want to consider are:

• Do we have a sales process?
• Are our processes repeatable?
• If a key person leaves the company, are there sufficient processes in place so we wouldn’t suffer significant downtime?
• Do I have the appropriate processes in place to help scale the business?
• Are my processes connected? In other words, are all the processes that touch the customer and generate revenue connected?

Reason #3: Mindset

Revenue generation is a top-down process, so the mindset of the leadership sets the revenue generation culture within the organization. Period.

It cannot be overlooked.

My favorite quote

There’s no such thing as fear of success, there’s only the fear of the responsibility that success brings.

 The fear of added responsibility is largely unconscious, but I often hear it from business leaders and owners when asking them about their struggles.

Questions to ask

• Will adding new staff and processes create more work for you?
• Are you concerned about losing control if the company grows too big?
• How will growth impact your lifestyle?

The good news is that just recognizing that you have some unconscious fears and concerns will help you break through.

Next Steps: Create a Gap Analysis

If you are unsure what is causing your revenues to stagnate, then consider doing a S.W.O.T. or S.W.O.T.T Analysis to measure your organization’s Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, and Threats (and Trends). You can even use this tool for specific departments within the business.

When done well, a S.W.O.T. analysis can be a guiding document for the organization. Once it’s been completed, you can use the S.W.O.T to create a gap analysis and plan based on your priorities.

If you’d like to discuss your biggest challenge, please give me a call at 888-365-1085.