10Stories Blog When Not To Care About Revenue

I know what you're thinking. I'm trying to get you fired. This blog should probably be marked NSFW at most places.I'm serious, though. Stop thinking about revenue.Who Am I Talking To?You're right, this doesn't apply to everybody.If your product is sunglasses, I suggest you continue to think about revenue. If you're trying to get more subscriptions to Netflix (there are people who don't have Netflix?), you should care about revenue. If you're selling tickets to a rock show, then you should definitely care about revenue.But I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about selling a product that's worth at least $X,000 and sometimes much more than that. B2B sales with a sales team that's doing the selling. If you're marketing for Real Business , you shouldn't be staring at that revenue number more than four times a year. It's about as relevant to you as it is to the engineering team. (We do need revenue to stay in business, after all.)You're Waiting Too LongIf you're selling a product that takes more than 4 weeks between product discovery and money in the bank, marketing can't afford to wait for those deals to close before deciding if those programs were successful. Here are some things that take 4 weeks:Renewing a passport.Buying a product from an infomercial.Growing basil to have true leaves. Twice.You can only do these things 12 times a year. And that's the best case: even if the average sale takes 4 weeks, it takes 6, 8, or 10 weeks to get all the sales from a program. I'll bet there's at least one rep on your team with a deal age that has 3 digits in it. He swears it's alive, too - it's totally closing this month. If that deal closes, will you declare the conference you first met that lead at a success?4 weeks is forever. Every day there's new news from your competition, new use cases that come up from your user base, and shifting behaviors in clicks and subscriptions based on the content that you're working so hard to put out. You can't afford to wait until there's no doubt and the dollars are in the bank.Your Prices are RandomBut doesn't waiting for revenue at least create some certainty in your results? It might take a while, but if a program paid back 5x ROI, it's certainly worth doing again, right?Wrong.Revenue is the ultimate output, but marketing doesn't own a specific revenue number. Marketing owns the machinery to create a revenue machine. That program with 5x ROI? That was one deal. And next quarter, when that one deal fails to close because of security concerns, suddenly it's 0x ROI. The program that produces 30 deals this quarter and 31 deals the next is far more valuable, because it can be predicted and changed when needed. Next quarter you can double spend on it and make it 60. The revenue won't be exactly twice as much, but it'll be pretty close.What Should You Do?You should think about how to produce the same thing every week. Weeks lead to months, months lead to quarters, and those quarters will suddenly start to look predictable. Everybody is a little bit different, but fundamentally, there's something that happens every week that's worth tracking and can change based on what you and your team put together. Here's an incomplete list of metrics worth caring about:Webpage visitsCaptured namesQualified namesNames in qualified accountsSales-qualified accountsNew + trial product loginsMarketing-driven conversations with a sales repOpportunitiesBut revenue? Unless you're very lucky, I can't imagine why you'd stare at that number all day. All it's going to do is stress you out.