Jason is the co-founder and CEO of tvScientific, the first performance marketing platform for ConnectedTV (CTV).
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I’ve been in high-growth startup environments for over 25 years, and one of the leadership axioms I’ve picked up along the way is, “There are two kinds of problems: revenue problems and everything else.” If you agree, then it follows that all organizations need to value and cultivate what my company calls “Revenue IQ.”
What is Revenue IQ? We’ve all heard of emotional intelligence, which implies a well-developed ability to perceive, communicate and connect with others. In sports, people talk about “basketball IQ,” and they usually mean a keen understanding of the sport, what’s going on around you as a player and how to maneuver within the game to drive maximum advantage (e.g., score points and win the game). Revenue IQ is a set of qualities, values and behaviors that enable individuals to work toward maximizing company revenue.
The Qualities Of Revenue IQ
What are the qualities of Revenue IQ? Here are examples:
• Urgency and drive: It’s essential to maintain a deep sense of urgency and drive around revenue, and an understanding of your relationship to it. This translates into all aspects of your job and requires hard work, grit and the ability to get things done. Every day something gets delayed is a day that revenue gets delayed. You can’t teach drive and urgency, but they are essential.
• Expertise: Being an expert in your industry and your company’s product is essential and foundational to Revenue IQ. This requires constant learning, which requires drive, intellectual curiosity and hard work.
• Mastery of your craft: Make sure you understand your role within the organization and master the skills you need to execute your job and make the greatest contribution to revenue.
• “Skate to where the puck is going”: This famous Wayne Gretzky quote applies to Revenue IQ. When you are an absolute expert in your field, working hard with a sense of urgency around revenue, you can begin to sense where the market is going and detect new opportunities. This skill can transform a company by enabling you to identify patterns and trends in the market, and then helping inform the strategy that has the potential to reinvent the company.
• No egos: The right answer is rarely driven by the biggest title in the room or the biggest ego. Getting to the right answer requires deep domain understanding, open communication, collaboration and a data-driven process that includes a feedback loop from the market. Ego blocks these processes, kills communication and collaboration, and ultimately kills innovation (and companies).
How Revenue IQ Applies To Different Roles
The above qualities are crucial for those in sales roles, but they’re also important for every role up to CEOs. How can a CEO lead a company without Revenue IQ? How can a head of account management or customer success be successful if they don’t know how the product works better than their customers? And how can an engineer be effective if they don’t deeply understand how their work is connected to the company’s overall success?
Here’s how Revenue IQ can apply to different roles within a company:
• Sales leaders: Sales leaders need to personify Revenue IQ. They must also be able to identify talent that has Revenue IQ potential. These people can come from all walks of life, but they stand out almost immediately because they always seem to find the next deal or are working on the next “out of nowhere” opportunity. Motivate and mentor this talent, and the organization will get a massive return on investment.
• Salespeople: We’ve all seen the salespeople with high Revenue IQ—they are always busy, consistently beating their quotas and seem to be perpetually in the middle of the action. Much of this comes down to consistent patterns of behavior. For salespeople, Revenue IQ means understanding and executing all aspects of the sales process, from product/industry knowledge to client identification, to outbound prospecting, to pitching and follow-up meetings through the close.
• Customer success/account management: Most company revenue is ultimately managed by account management teams, so make sure you build these teams with Revenue IQ in mind. These teams are never about managing revenue or managing relationships; they are about growing revenue. If you are not growing revenue, you are on the defensive, and great growth companies are not built on defense.
• Product and engineering: Everyone in the company must understand revenue objectives and be able to connect the dots between what they are doing and that revenue goal. This applies to everything, including pure research, feature development and infrastructure development. Engineers must continuously ask themselves how what they are doing is connected to current or future revenue objectives.
• Finance: Lots of finance executives have a “bean counter” mentality that is focused on optimizing what exists rather than growing revenue or creating new revenue lines. That may be okay for companies like IBM or GE, but for any growth company, the name of the game is to innovate, grow and then optimize. If you try to optimize too early, you’ll likely kill innovation, growth or both.
• Marketers: Ironically, marketers often have the lowest Revenue IQ. Just look at the key performance indicators many brand marketers employ. In traditional media buying, success is measured through reach and frequency against target demographics, or gross rating points. These abstract KPIs drive literally tens of billions of dollars in annual ad spend, yet they have no connection to revenue. Revenue IQ in marketing means connecting all activities and investments back to revenue impact, with a sense of urgency to drive material ROI for the company.
Conclusion
Revenue IQ is a critical component of a company’s growth and success, and it should apply to all team members within an organization. By cultivating a deep understanding of revenue and how it connects to our work, we can all help drive the success of our companies and our own career development.
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