According to major accountancy firm Grant Thornton, UK businesses could have missed out on up to £72bn of revenue opportunities in 2018. These findings will be surprising and frustrating to a hard-pressed business looking to grow and get the most out of their customer operations.

What most business leaders are looking for, especially with speculative activity like customer operations, are some more concrete actions that will help make the process of generating and securing revenue opportunities more efficient, watertight and measurable.

Causes of missed revenue opportunity are not down to a single factor, but more likely to fall into a combination of the following areas:

• Poor presence; Not responding to the shift in the market created through digitisation – missing opportunities through not being seen.
• Poor positioning; Not creating value through a distinctive and compelling proposition – missing opportunities through not being noticed.
• Poor processes; Not capturing value through poor tracking and reporting of opportunities – missing opportunities through poor organisation and systems.
• Poor persuasion; Failing to convert prospects – missing opportunities by not building their position as the preferred supplier.

It’s not just investment in generating opportunities that can help you capture that missed revenue, the real gains come from having the organisation behind it to make the most of every opportunity. These marginal gains are where the big profit growth opportunities lie. The critical element? To measure – so you can see what’s working and what is being missed.

Do You Have to Spend More to Get More?

Better organisation does away with the usual assumption that more revenue means more customers – and that your marketing spend needs to go up to attract more enquiries. That’s the conventional business logic. But it is the most expensive and least effective method, as it misses the key and most efficient opportunities to achieve more sustainable revenue and profit growth, without increasing costs. Opportunities such as:

• Switch into inbound enquiries to generate better market penetration at a lower cost.
• Improving the quality of enquiries.
• Converting more enquiries into sales.
• Increasing the average sale value.
• Increasing the frequency of purchase.
• Reducing customer defections.

The theme that unites these opportunities is a focus on the efficiency of customer operations and the value to the organisation this can deliver in terms of profit growth without spending any more. Digital marketing is not only the most effective method of connecting with your target audience, but it is also the cheapest way for initiating value-based buying cycles.

That may all sound obvious, but think of this: how often is the experience we receive as consumers one that feels like it’s geared around our convenience and loyalty?

A few questions all businesses should ask:

• How well do we understand what our customers value most? How many customers do we lose because we do not communicate value effectively?
• Do prospects see us as an organisation that can, and will, deliver what they value most?
• How many customers do we lose because the experience fell short of their expectations?
• Do all of our customers know everything we could do for them?
• Is every interaction between our people and our customers what we would want it to be, 100% of the time?
• What triggers our customers to make a repeat purchase and can we pre-empt that decision?

These are just some of the questions to ask to kick-start your transformation to becoming a business that drives sustainable revenue growth through customer operations. The good news is that this is a process you can track and measure – so you can see exactly where you are getting a better return.

Low Cost, High Impact

Revenue growth doesn’t have to mean spending more to get more leads. Often, you can achieve your growth targets by making better use of the opportunities you already have. Low-cost efficiency improvements in customer operations can deliver a big impact, and making better use of what you have can deliver sustainable results more quickly and easily.

In a nutshell, that’s what we do at Access Performance Solutions; we help businesses get closer to their full customer profit potential through actionable and measurable improvements. This, in turn, means they leave far fewer revenue opportunities on the table. If that sounds interesting, give us a call on 01823 429339 and let’s talk about it.