5 Steps to Building a High-Performing Revenue Engine

“If you build it, they will come” is the biggest — and most dangerous — myth in business. There are countless early-stage SaaS companies out there trying to break out from the ranks of sub-$2 million ARR businesses and into the big leagues of $20 million, $50 million, and beyond. And the truth is that a lot of them have great, innovative products. But the ones who make it big are the ones who back that product up with a high-performance revenue engine.

At Ohana Operators, we work with founders of all different kinds of companies and stages, and one of the first things we emphasize is the importance of a consistent and predictable revenue engine. If a company cannot deliver sales, it’s never going to reach success no matter how incredible or game-changing the product is. After seeing and working with many great startup models, let’s take a look at common themes in building successful revenue engines.

1. It all starts with culture and leadership
It’s natural to believe that people will work hard and perform their best because they have an individual drive for excellence. While this is often a factor, for most employees and Sales reps, terms like Quota and “KPIs” are just figures.Rather, what drives them to perform at their best is the feeling that they are a part of something bigger and they’re trusted, collaborated with, and valued. At our core, we fundamentally want to make a meaningful contribution to something bigger than ourselves. For a company to thrive, it starts with the values instilled by the Founder and leadership team, and permeates through every corner of your operating model.Here’s what to do:

• Involve people in the decision-making process early on and throughout
• Make delegating a habit
• Incorporate a bottoms-up approach to ideas, creativity, and strategy

“We’re seeing the role of the executive changing,” says Eelco van Maaren. “What was once about steering the ship from a tightly controlled command center is now a shift to co-enablement, empathy, and fostering strategic connections in a hybrid business world. We’re seeing more instances of Co-CEO and Chief Empathy Officer in place of traditional CEO, CRO, or COOs. And contrary to the fear that this could slow operations down, we’re actually seeing the opposite with faster decision-making, time to market, and GTM iterations.”

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2. Get hiring right

When it comes to ramping up a scalable and predictable revenue engine, hiring the right people at the right time is harder than you’d think and often goes underestimated. Here are three tips to help nail this hard-to-navigate area:

• Be clear on what your team should look like before hiring starts. It’s common to see founders jumping right to hiring senior leadership, but that rarely goes well. Instead, map out short-medium-long term team plans and goals even at seed stage. This will help you avoid the common pitfall of hiring too early or too late, both equally as harmful.
• Balance a candidate’s skills with their characteristics. Skills and experience are critical, but don’t forget that you can train for skills; you can’t train someone's character. Hire someone that has the passion and ambition but mostly intelligence to adapt and grow as you pivot and refocus your business throughout the years. Look for those who have an insatiable appetite for success and a genuine excitement for your product and your customers.
• Stop trying to do it all. Lean on trusted advisors and people in your network who have gone through it before and who can offer help. This can keep you agile and focused on innovation, while curbing heavy costs that come with hiring full time leadership.

3. Hone in on people, process, and tools‍

Building a growth engine means getting your foundational blueprint right, and this doesn’t happen just by luck. Eelco van Maaren and Amit Sridharan, Co-founder and Managing Partner at First Rays Venture Partners offer a few considerations to think about in this critical phase:
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• Before you chart a course on GTM, nail your ideal customer profile. As you go through the first $0-1 million in sales, ask the questions around who is your buyer and who is the influencer inside that organization.
• Map the Sales journey. Just like a customer journey, there should be a sales motion journey for your product. This should be done by founders before you hire your first Sales executive. Even in founder-led sales, you should think about the process — the number of sales meetings in a month, the number of meetups you are doing to talk to your community. Once you can see repeatable patterns on use cases and sales, you will know that it is time to build a great sales team around it.
• Get your house in order. Invest in foundational systems now that will pay off down the line such as data-tight CRMs like Salesforce and demand gen stacks like Hubspot or Marketo. Efficient and high-performing tools and systems can play a big role in scaling revenue and making data-driven decisions as a team.
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4. Timing and balance are a delicate dance

It’s important to have a sense of outward timing and grasp on when inflection points are happening, to recognize a combination of market opportunity and your solution as a new technology that can service that. As Cisco’s former CEO John T Chambers always says: “The key is capturing markets in transition.”
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Alok Nandan, PhD, Co-founder and Managing Partner at First Rays, describes three questions a seed-stage Founder can ask to figure out GTM and tune your sales motions:

• What is the model? Are you going to start with top-down vs. bottom-up vs. open source / community?
• What kind of investment are you making? Are you selling into a Brownfield or a Greenfield?
• What is your market? Are you going to eventually go upmarket (sell to larger companies) and/or to more senior personas to land and expand ACV?

Internally, aim to strike a balance between your revenue engine and product readiness. Often one is more advanced than the other, so the product may be ready to market but not the selling organization and, as a result, every customer experience is different and unpredictable. Customers want predictability and reliability.

In the other instance, Sales may be fully ready to sell and has the infrastructure, setup, process and reps having conversations but your product needs more iteration. If it's unclear what it really solves for you’re setting up a bad buying experience and can expect low adoption, attrition and longer sales cycles with hesitant buyers burning your sales out.

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5. Execute, iterate, repeat
Once you’ve set up the ideal buying experience and prepared your team to tell a captivating story, it's time to look at the data and make refinements to sharpen the engagement. Carefully go through what went well and what could go even better.

Looking at this data and the feedback you received should give you continuous areas you can improve — not only enhancing your product, but also changing how your audience experiences doing business with your sales team. Ensure your selling process is as prescriptive and detailed as possible allowing for higher win rates and earlier scale while being efficient moving forward.Hope you find value from these insights on building a high-performing revenue engine

Credits of Eelco van Maaren, Alok Nandan, PhD, and Amit Sridharan

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