Lost revenue. It’s a reality for all businesses. Even if your company had a banner year, you inevitably experienced some type of financial loss. However, you can reduce those losses by putting revenue recapture strategies into motion.
You’ll see quite a few benefits when you start recapturing the money that’s been leaking out of your business. The first is obvious: The opportunity to become more profitable. Other advantages can be less apparent at first but important nonetheless, such as improved morale.
Take your sales team. High-performing salespeople thrive on making conversions. When their deals keep falling through, they risk disengagement. A Gartner survey of B2B sellers found that 89% were burning out. Not surprisingly, more than half were considering going somewhere else as a result. You certainly can’t afford to lose both revenue and your trained sales members.
Another upside to reducing your revenue loss is an improved relationship with buyers. Revenue loss is often connected to unsatisfactory customer experiences. Consider shoppers who make it to your product pages but never complete their orders. They’ve dropped off for a reason, and if you fix the problem, you can make them happier—and more likely to return.
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Fixing the Flaws in Your Revenue-Generating Machine
Though your business is unique to your setup and industry, the following revenue recovery ideas should help you get started. Be sure to put measurements in place. That way, you can determine if the systems you try are reclaiming some of the revenue you’ve lost.
1. Reevaluate your pricing structure.
It doesn’t matter if you sell table lamps or commercial refrigerators: You get to set your prices. If you set them too high, you may lose revenue because you’re misaligned with the market. On the other hand, if you set them too low, you may lose revenue due to razor-thin profit margins.
Carefully examine the price of everything you sell. You may want to consider doing some A/B split tests to determine if one price encourages more sales than another. Don’t be afraid to raise your prices to cover your costs, particularly if you’re not making much now. Unless a product is a so-called “loss leader” and gets you other sales, you may want to boost its price point.
Beyond anything else, remember that pricing is something that you can always control. Some companies, like airlines and hotels, rely on dynamic pricing augmented by AI-driven software. Dynamic pricing may work for your business, too. It’s worth checking out if the perceived value of what you sell ebbs and flows. And as McKinsey points out, bundling can enhance the benefits of dynamic pricing.
2. Revisit your marketing plan.
Take a long, hard look at your sales funnels. Is your marketing driving target customers through your pipelines smoothly and consistently? Or are leads hitting stumbling blocks along the way? Even if you just revised your marketing in the last year, you may need to revisit your strategies again. After all, marketing is a moving target. It’s also an area where you can recapture or reinvigorate waning revenue.
This isn’t to put blame on your marketing team or agency. Customer and client needs can change rapidly, as they did during and after the pandemic. With inflation rising and recession lurking around the corner, many buyers have changed their approach. If your marketing hasn’t evolved alongside them, you may be advertising to the wrong crowd or in the wrong way.
To figure out where to make tweaks in your marketing, find places of unusual dropoff. As an example, do a few specific landing pages have unusually high bounce rates? Aim to discover why. Is it that you’re attracting unqualified leads? Are qualified leads not getting what they expect at your website? Uncovering the root cause of the bounce rate should drive more solid leads into the top of your funnel and boost sales.
3. Recover abandoned cart revenue.
Every time a possible shopper abandons an online cart, you lose revenue. And it unfortunately happens quite frequently. Around 70% of all digital shopping cart engagements end in lost abandoned cart revenue according to Retention.com research.
Again, your first move is to understand why. Cart abandonment can be linked to everything from slow site speeds to complicated checkout processes. In some cases, simply adding more payment options or allowing guest logins can fuel big gains for your company. Just be careful not to make too many changes at once. Otherwise, you may not be able to tell which strategy actually moved the needle.
Another way to encourage customers to return to their abandoned online carts is through marketing campaigns. These campaigns could include emails or texts reminding shoppers of their “waiting” items. A bit of prompting can re-energize a customer and allow you to finish a sale that would have been lost.
4. Automate all redundant, repetitive workflows.
Formstack’s 2022 State of Digital Maturity report uncovered some interesting statistics regarding manual workflows. Perhaps the biggest was that half of workers say they perform around two hours of repetitive duties daily. That’s a huge amount of time wasted on to-dos that could potentially be done by automated software and systems.
Though it might not seem like your team members’ repetitive tasks are having an effect on your revenue, they are. What’s the saying? “Time is money.” It’s a truism you can’t afford to forget or ignore. Not only are manual processes unnecessary, but they can lead to expensive human errors.
A fast way to automate workflows is by investing in one centralized software system. A single system can house all your data and automatically populate data based on your needs. Your personnel won’t have to input information by hand, meaning less work for them and fewer mistakes. Imagine if everyone had up to 10 hours each week to be more productive. Certainly, that would have a major impact on your company’s revenue.
It might not be feasible for your company to recover all the revenue that you lose in a given year. Nevertheless, recovering anything will allow you to get closer to achieving or exceeding your financial goals.
