Revenue-Generating Activities Only
Currently, if there's a choice to be made about where my time is spent, it's on whatever is closest to money. The other stuff doesn't get my attention that hour, day, week, or maybe ever.
1-minute 15-second read
Revenue-generating activities only is my current mantra. This prompt has helped tremendously when it comes to choosing between activities that are competing for my time.
Currently, if there's a choice to be made about where my time is spent, it's on whatever is closest to money. The other stuff doesn't get my attention that hour, day, week, or maybe ever.
This radical simplification of time allocation has to do with two things:
1. We’re a small GTM team with little bandwidth for experimentation outside of our core lanes.
2. We have a very clear revenue goal this year.
(FYI, rallying around a number creates a ton of focus and energy that's pointed at a singular goal. I recommend revenue being that point of focus.)
In terms of effort, this translates to: 90% rev gen activities, 10% experiments on longer-term brand projects (things that might produce revenue 6+ months out).
When it feels like there are a hundred things that you can be doing, determining where to focus and what to prioritize on any given day feels overwhelming.
Hence the mantra: Revenue-generating activities only.
This narrows what we can do by a lot. It creates a filter that removes all clutter. It aligns expectations across the team and the company. And many things become nice-to-haves—and put on the list of future-maybe’s.
There are tradeoffs. But in my experience, they’re not as big as I would have thought.
What I’ve learned:
If you have a brand-first mindset, you can simultaneously be very tactical and revenue-focused while doing all the nice brand awareness stuff.
How? Be a human. Don’t be aggressive. Maintain thoughtfulness in your approach by thinking of every interaction—conversation, email, follow-up, ad, landing page, website visit—as an opportunity to build affinity and awareness for your brand.
In simple terms: Only do the things that you’d want to experience yourself as a prospective buyer. Aka, get to the point, make the experience friendly and efficient, allow the buyer to filter themselves in or out on their own without the need for a conversation, and if you reach out to someone as a stranger, do it with relevance.
Tactical and revenue-focused with built-in brand marketing. I’ve learned that it’s actually a thing.
Both/and, not either/or.
If what you do is legitimately different and hyper-relevant to a specific niche, you can get away with this.
If you’re competing in a general category with category leaders, you can’t—by default, you have to brute force your way in and try to get a spot in line.
(If you’re joining a small, scrappy team, choose your opportunities wisely. Forcing is not good for either side of this equation.)