On today’s show, we discuss how to have an effective revenue strategy.

Falkon CEO and Co-founder Mona Akmal is a product and engineering veteran who builds resourceful, kind, and output-driven teams that create and scale success-enabling products. With a passion for crafting elegant solutions to technically difficult problems, she has grown teams, businesses, and many products at Microsoft, Amperity, Code.org, and Zulily.

The impact of Mona’s work includes ramping from $0 to $11M in ARR and 15 household brands as happy customers at Amperity; from 10M to 100M students learning computer science on the Code.org platform; and from 1M to 1B docs in the cloud with OneDrive and Office.

Key Takeaways:

• Engineering and Business intersect by focusing on
  • efficiency
  • balancing the entire equation with analytical thinking
  • processing many variables to optimize an engine/business
• Challenges facing organizations in the Go To Market space
  • Siloed points of view. Various departments focused only on their departmental issues, and not net revenue retention.
  • Teams focused on execution and not thinking long-term.
  • Misunderstanding of the purpose of culture and operating principles.
• Indicators of a silo problem
  • Ask different teams why they are not performing and they blame each other.
  • Conflict between senior leadership.
• How to fix the problem
  • Executive leadership members are the neutral parties and need to do a good job of having a great data strategy, so there is a system of truth.
  • Have shared objectives.
  • Bottoms up feedback. Have conversations with average employees to gain non-digital data – very valuable perspectives. This will help gain a more full picture of the truth.
• Recommendations for key metrics to focus on
  • Input metrics – who you are targeting, how you are targeting them.
  • Marketing activities and ROI on campaigns and channels.
  • Sales development activities – conversion numbers.
  • Employee productivity – cost vs output.
• Recommendations for accurate and effective data
  • Data has to be directionally accurate. Focus on the trends, not the details.
  • Invest in operations – marketing and revenue.
  • Make employees’ lives easier by investing in the tools that will help them be productive.
• AI trends within GTM
  • Conversational intelligence and coaching driven by AI.
  • Data governance – anomaly detection and data cleaning driven by AI.
  • AI GTM intelligence tools that will look at massive amounts of activity data and pinpoint the key things to focus on to maximize your revenue engine.

Top Takeaways:

• Reflect on whether your objectives and key results as a senior leader are representative of a silo or not. Make sure you are also focused on revenue.
• Invest in a good data strategy and spend 50% of your time focusing on the future.

Connect with Mona Akmal:

Website: http://falkon.ai

LinkedIn Falkon: https://www.linkedin.com/company/falkonai/

LinkedIn Mona: https://www.linkedin.com/in/mona-akmal/

The expert guest was booked via The Expert Bookers, www.expertbookers.com.