Connecting B2B Products to Revenue
I wrote an unconventional post (my stream of consciousness thoughts while reading a Twitter thread) about 6 months ago that sparked a lot of discussion from readers. The following sentence in particular elicited a lot of reactions:
“in B2B products, you have to connect to revenue (generation or preservation)”
The 2 big questions that came up were:
Why does product have to connect to revenue?
How do you actually show that connection?
Yesterday’s audio post answered question #1. Today I’d like to elaborate on question #2.
At the highest level, a B2B business can be broken down into 3 KPIs:
growth
retention
margins
When stating that product has to connect to revenue, I’m taking into account how each of these top-level metrics has a revenue component:
growth → revenue generation
retention → revenue preservation
margins → revenue sustainability
Now these business KPIs might be too big a jump for a product org to rally around - what’s more likely during a planning cycle (annual / bi-annual / quarterly) i…
