Any company in the world needs to continuously consider how they can generate more revenue with fewer resources. (If you do not belong in this category I would be very interested in listening to your story.)

Even if you do not have any ambitions for growing your revenue, you still have to consider how to keep your customer acquisition and renewal costs at bay.

There are a handful of fundamental concepts on which you must have a firm grip, and they are your business model, your ideal customer profile, your target personas, your customer value proposition and your revenue generation process.

If you serve the market through resellers, then you can add your ideal reseller profile, your reseller value proposition, and your reseller program.

My message in this post is: Don’t waste your time reinventing the wheel – there are plenty of definitions already available that you can implement immediately.

Alexander Osterwalder documents the definition of and the guidelines for how to work with the business model and the value proposition in books, videos, and workshops extremely well. Get familiar with the principles and use them.

Marylou Tyler and Jeremey Donovan have covered the ideal customer profile and target personas in a very practical format in their book Predictable Prospecting: How to Radically Increase Your B2B Sales Pipeline (2016). There is also a very practical approach to designing the lead generation process.

Aaron Ross and Marylou Tyler published Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into a Sales Machine with the $100 Million Best Practices of Salesforce.com in 2011 and Trish Bertuzzi released The Sales Development Playbook: Build Repeatable Pipeline and Accelerate Growth with Inside Sales in January 2016.

If you serve the market through channel partners, then I suggest you take a look at my book Building Successful Partner Channels (in the software industry).

Revenue generation is a profession, and as with any job, you need to learn the trade first before practice makes you a professional. There is no school teaching you how to design a scalable revenue generation platform so you have to put the curriculum together yourself.

Study and pick the frameworks you prefer and then apply them. You will most likely make a twist here and there, but as new employees come on board, you now have a documented framework that they can learn and that you can help them internalize. If you hire outside help, then you can specify exactly where to focus.

Click here for a longer list of resources.