Revenue Motion
Revenue Motion is how revenue moves, and is moved, through the business end to end: how it is won, kept and grown, and how the company is organised, measured and paid to do it. When a company outgrows its motion, the symptoms turn up everywhere. The diagnostic finds where the motion actually broke.
Strategy and insights
Go-to-market design
- Won
- Kept
- Grown
Operations and processes
What the model covers
Revenue Motion treats the pieces as one system. Go-to-market design sets who you sell to and how, and from there two layers act on every stage of winning, keeping and growing. Strategy and insights decides where effort goes and shows leadership what is actually happening. Operations and processes is how that work runs day to day, and how it is measured and paid for. Move one layer without the other and a problem fixed inside one function reappears somewhere else two quarters later.
One trigger: the motion gets outgrown in predictable steps. Roughly every time a team triples, the coordination holding it together stops reaching: past seven or eight people one manager can no longer hold every deal and every person, and around twenty-seven the same break repeats a layer up among the managers.
A second trigger has nothing to do with size. Where a region, a division or an acquired business has to reconcile with a head office running its own process, systems and compensation, the motion has to work across that boundary as well as inside it. A £30m division inside a £1bn group carries that problem where a £30m standalone company does not.
The scope is revenue-bounded: the revenue function, not the company's operating model, so that the work stays small enough to actually change something.
Where this sits
This is the work that decides what gets built. The output is a decision and a design: what the revenue motion should be, what it costs to get there, in what order. Delivered for the people who own the number.
I have built these systems as well as designed them. The value is in the design: a system built on an undecided motion works exactly as specified and changes nothing, which is why the motion gets settled first and the build follows it.
The Revenue Motion Diagnostic
A bounded piece of work that establishes where your revenue motion has gone ad hoc, what that is costing you, and what to fix first. It runs as working sessions with the people who own the numbers, against an agreed scope, and it ends in a document you can act on with or without me.
What has to be answered is different in every business, which is why it is scoped and quoted each time. It is also not the first conversation: the introductory call comes first, and part of what that call decides is whether a diagnostic is warranted at all.
What a diagnostic needs from you
Without these, the output is not worth having.
- A scope agreed before we start.
- What is in, what is out, and what the output has to answer. I will not open-endedly explore.
- The right people in the room.
- The revenue leaders who own the numbers, not delegates. Where the answer sits with the board or the exec team, they need to be part of it.
- Working sessions, not just interviews.
- Scheduled time with the people who run the functions, over an agreed period.
- An output document you can act on.
- The situation as I found it, what is causing it, the options with their trade-offs, and a recommendation you can take to a board.
What the diagnostic assesses
Eight dimensions, each scored against what is observably happening rather than what the plan says.
- GTM strategy and segmentation
- Is effort pointed at the right market, and does coverage match it?
- Funnel and pipeline math
- Does the funnel arithmetic support the plan, and does anyone know it?
- Process architecture
- Do deals move through a designed process or a remembered one?
- Systems and data
- Is there one version of the truth, and is it trusted?
- Forecasting, governance and reporting
- Is the forecast a method or a mood, and does each altitude get the answer it needs?
- Comp and incentives
- Do incentives pay for the behaviour the strategy needs?
- Customer lifecycle and NRR
- Is retention and expansion a managed motion or an inbox?
- Org and capability
- Are the right roles in place for this stage, and can the team run what gets built?
How each dimension is scored
- 1 Ad hoc Lives in individuals' heads. Outcomes depend on heroics.
- 2 Emerging Partial process or tooling, inconsistently used. Workarounds are normal.
- 3 Defined Documented and mostly followed. Data usable with caveats.
- 4 Managed Instrumented, reviewed on a cadence, exceptions get handled.
- 5 Compounding The function improves itself. Leaders steer with it rather than around it.
What to expect
How the work is agreed, how it is run, and how it ends.
- A written scope and a number.
- Agreed before anything starts, and neither moves without a conversation.
- A defined end.
- Engagements that are scoped to finish. The end is in the scope, not implied by it.
- Findings attach to process, not people.
- The wrong motion with the right or wrong people is still the wrong motion.
- Documented, handed over.
- You keep the model, the definitions and the working papers, and your team runs them.
- No lock-in.
- Each engagement stands on its own. Nothing commits you to the next one.
Start with a conversation
Forty-five minutes to understand where growth has outpaced how you run revenue, and what you have already tried.
You will leave with my read and a straight answer on whether a diagnostic is the right next step or something else. If the right help is not me, I will tell you who it is. No pitch. No deck.