CEOs Lack Full Visibility into What Actually Drives Growth: Revenue Operations Associates Offers Unique and Effective Solution

A unique diagnostic method reveals the hidden execution gaps causing a majority of mid-market B2B companies to miss revenue growth targets.

Most mid-market B2B businesses miss revenue targets, and their leaders don’t know the real reasons why.

Fifty-five percent of mid-market companies are regularly missing quarterly revenue forecasts by more than 10%.⁽¹⁾ These businesses are not underperforming because of bad strategy, product, or sales.

A primary reason these businesses are not meeting their goals is because they lack visibility into the 40 underlying operational drivers that determine whether revenue targets will be achieved, according to research from Revenue Operations Associates. These ‘blind spots’ exist because current financial, operational, and performance reporting approaches don’t adequately factor in the new market reality that growth is a process-driven and asset intensive team sport played by multiple specialized functions. The research shows that over half of growth outcomes are created by teamwork across functions not within sales or marketing. Another finding was that growth assets, like customer knowledge, innovation management, data utilization, culture and alignment actually have a much bigger impact on future revenues than the metrics commonly measured on performance dashboards.

These ‘blind spots’ matter because they cost companies millions in lost revenue and unrealized shareholder value. They also put CEO and CRO jobs at-risk when they must explain to their boards why revenue targets are consistently missed.

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“CEOs typically don’t have visibility into the true drivers of growth in their business,” says Steve Busby, CEO of Revenue Operations Associates. “They monitor backward looking activity and outcome metrics like pipeline velocity, win rates, revenues, retention. But they don’t see the underlying process, alignment, and capability factors that determine those outcomes. So, it’s challenging for them to fix what they can’t see and measure.”

To address this gap, Revenue Operations Associates has launched The GTM Accelerator, the only diagnostic method that evaluates all of the proven drivers of go-to-market performance and revenue growth. This proprietary method assesses every potential way a business can grow to identify the highest impact actions to improve revenue performance—often without adding headcount or budget.

Common ‘blind spots’ uncovered by The GTM Accelerator include:

• Revenue and margin leaking due to lack of coordination between all the functions that support the revenue cycle
• Poor resource allocation and performance optimization decisions due to the failure to turn a wealth of customer intelligence that’s not in a database into decision-making knowledge
• Inconsistent revenue realization and cash flow because Finance is not involved early enough in the process in critical pricing, planning, forecasting and resource allocation decisions
• Diminished customer lifetime value due to lack of coordination between marketing, sales, customer success and product to identify and monetize cross-sell and expansion opportunities
• The inability to capitalize on product innovations in the market due to friction between product, marketing, sales, customer success, finance and IT

“Most companies reflexively jump straight to hiring or firing CROs, adding headcount, changing comp plans, or buying new technology when they miss their revenue targets” says Stephen Diorio, author of the bestselling book Revenue Operations who helped design the diagnostic method. “But they fail to measure and manage over sixty percent of the factors that drive growth like teamwork across functions and better monetizing commercial assets such as innovations, relationship equity, knowledge, digital infrastructure and brands. So they rarely pull all the growth levers that could unlock more revenue with existing resources.”

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The GTM Accelerator evaluates all 40 proven growth drivers to identify and address the root causes of underperformance. The method examines factors that don’t show up in traditional financial and performance reporting like process discipline, cross-functional communications, change readiness, cultural alignment, and technology utilization.

This helps the owners, CEOs and growth leaders of mid-market businesses get immediate consensus, buy-in and conviction on the best ‘levers’ to improve growth strategy execution and accelerate growth. GTM teams receive clear execution guidance and support so their organization can execute immediately to get growth back on plan.

“With a mandate from our PE sponsor to transform i4cp into a scalable, high-growth recurring revenue business, I needed a clear, data-driven assessment of our go-to-market performance and a roadmap for improvement,” reports Terry Waters the CEO of i4cp, a global research and advisory firm serving CHRO’s. “The GTM Accelerator method with Revenue Operations Associates delivered exactly that – surfacing the structural and organizational issues that were critical to unlocking growth.”