How to Empower Teams to Grow Business Revenue

The first step to supercharging your ideas into a revenue-driving game plan is to get your team on board.

In my two decades of helping businesses grow through innovation, the only companies I’ve seen succeed are the ones whose teams are all aligned on the common goal.

Most often, that goal is to generate more revenue for the company although it can also focus on other types of business growth:

• Improving brand loyalty
• Developing acquisition plans
• Increasing average contract value
• Gaining more customers.

The trouble arises when an organization grows so quickly and becomes so complex that its teams steer farther away from the main vision of what it is the company is trying to achieve.

Leadership could have a clear vision of the goal but that vision is not translated to the supporting sales and marketing teams. Sometimes it’s the other way around.

The harsh reality is that companies whose employees are not aligned on strategic growth strategies will not win. Sure they may still grow and function but not at their full potential. Eventually they will plateau and the business will stop innovating and eventually fail.

So how do you steer the focus of your team home to your goal? Here’s two ideas that can help you get started on the journey to business growth:

“Teamwork is the ability to work together toward a common vision. The ability to direct individual accomplishments toward organizations objectives. It is the fuel that allows common people to attain uncommon results.” — Andrew Carnegie

Establish clear objectives and key results that drive business growth.

OKRs are widely used at F500 companies, particularly in tech companies like Google and Amazon which grow at exponential rates. It is a goal-setting tool created by OKRs created by Andy Grove at Intel to establish ambitious goals with measurable results. The framework also allows your teams to track progress, create alignment, and encourage engagement around measurable goals.

You can learn more about the entire OKR system here, but here are the two items your teams need to align on:

• Objectives: what needs to be achieved and by when. These need to be ambitious, action-oriented and inspirational. Your team should be excited and inspired to achieve these goals.
• Key Results: How will we know when we achieved these objectives? All goals need to be SMART (Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Realistic, and Timely).

If your company has been using OKRs for quite a while, be sure to check in and ask, “Are these objectives clear and effective? Have they generated results?” Sometimes teams can confuse OKRs for long-form to-do lists, but more on that later.

Create your roadmap to strategic growth.

Okay, so you have SMART goals and your team is amped and ready to grow the business. What comes next?

During days when there are multiple fires to put on and lots of to-dos, teams need to learn to prioritize the tasks that move the goals forward. As a business owner, your role is to give them the resources they need to do that.

Our team recently read The One Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results by Gary W. Keller and Jay Papasan which has helped the team at RIDG pair our OKRs with to-do lists that lead to results.

We prioritize our “one thing”, the company-wide goal, the first half of the day and use the afternoons to take care of the to-dos. This means we save administrative meetings for the second half of the day when possible and give our colleagues the time and space they need to make things happen first thing in the morning. It’s a team effort.

We also communicate our priority lists. If marketing knows that sales is striving to double their metrics, then they can prioritize items that will help them do that. This additional layer of transparency of goals and prioritizes allows teams to collaborate and support each other in growing the business.

RIDG’s customized innovation methodology is designed to guarantee scalable product or service design and continuous identification of increased revenue opportunities. From the customer experience journey to inspiring new ways to package everything you already have, we can help you team unlock new business value.