The 5 Ways to Drive Incremental Revenue

By Michael Gaudet — Benevity employee #63 (through a $1B+ exit), 20 fractional-CMO engagements delivered, Co.Labs Executive in Residence, Haskayne MBA.

There are only five ways to drive incremental revenue. Everything your sales, marketing, and client-success teams do — every campaign, every sequence, every renewal play — rolls up into one of these five. When I work with a B2B SaaS company that's trying to scale revenue after a raise, the first thing I do is name them plainly, because once you can see all five, you can stop guessing about where growth comes from and start deciding where to put your effort.

What are the only five ways to drive incremental revenue?

There are exactly five levers, and no more: get more leads, get better leads, raise your conversion rate, shorten your sales cycle, and increase net revenue retention. Every revenue tactic in existence is a way of pulling one of those five. ("Lead" here is broad — everything from a prospect to an open opportunity.)

1. More leads — net-new volume into the top of the funnel.
2. Better leads — the same volume, but closer to who you actually win and keep.
3. Higher conversion rate — more of what enters becomes a customer.
4. Shorter sales cycle — the same deals close faster, so the same effort produces more revenue per period.
5. Higher net revenue retention — existing customers expand and stay.

The single most useful thing on this list isn't a lever at all — it's the realization that a sharper Ideal Client Profile and buyer journey quietly enables four of the five. Better leads, higher conversion, shorter cycles, stronger retention all improve when you actually know who you're selling to and how they buy. That's why I treat the ICP as the foundation, not a deliverable.

How do you get more leads without wrecking lead quality?

There are three ways to generate net-new leads — inbound, outbound, and events — and the rule that governs all of them is that volume only scales revenue if quality holds. Inbound earns demand through content, search, and reputation. Outbound creates it through targeted, personalized prospecting. Events sit in between and can feed either channel depending on how you run them.

The trap is chasing raw volume. If you double your leads but halve their fit, you haven't grown revenue — you've grown cost and busywork, and you've buried your sales team in deals that won't close. More leads is a real lever, but only when the new volume is at least as good as what you had.

What makes a lead "better"?

A "better" lead is one that's a closer match to the customers you actually win, keep, and profit from — and there are four ways a lead gets better: tighter fit to your ICP, a warmer entry point, a clearer trigger to buy now, and a stronger internal champion. You can improve any one of them, or several at once.

All four trace back to the same source: a well-built ICP and buyer journey. When you know the firmographics, the personas, the buying triggers, and who inside the account pushes a deal forward, "better leads" stops being luck and becomes something you can engineer. The discipline of mapping every role in a deal — the economic buyer, the champion, the veto, the influencers — I owe to Bill Aulet's concept of the Decision-Making Unit in Disciplined Entrepreneurship; it remains one of the most useful tools I give clients for sharpening who a "good" lead really is.

How do you raise conversion and shorten the sales cycle?

Conversion rate and sales-cycle length move together, and the way you improve both is to get the revenue motion right before you automate it. The four levers here — a clear sales process, the right enablement, disciplined follow-up, and a CRM the team actually uses — are the unglamorous ones, and they compound.

The order matters. Automation applied to a broken process just helps you do the wrong thing faster. First make the motion work by hand: define the stages, know what moves a deal between them, and capture the data. Then automate — and use that automation partly to drive CRM adoption, because a CRM nobody updates can't tell you anything. Get the motion right, then scale it.

How do you grow net revenue retention?

Net revenue retention grows in two ways — keep more of the customers you have, and expand the ones who stay — and, like the others, both are downstream of knowing your customer. Retention is a churn problem: you reduce the reasons good customers leave. Expansion is a value problem: you find the accounts already getting outsized value and give them more to buy.

Retention is the most overlooked of the five, partly because it's invisible on a new-logo dashboard. But for a scale-up it's often the highest-leverage lever you have — it's cheaper than acquisition and it's the clearest signal that your product is actually delivering.

Who actually drives revenue? (Every team does.)

Revenue is a team sport, and every function contributes through one of three mechanisms: Creation, Protection, or Acceleration. It's a mistake to think revenue is only the sales team's job.

• Revenue (sales / marketing / CS) — Creation, through acquisition, expansion, and retention.
• Product & Engineering — Creation, through value delivery, reliability, and speed to market.
• Operations — Acceleration, through reduced friction, shorter cycle time, and lower cost-to-serve.
• Finance — Protection, through pricing discipline, forecasting, and capital allocation.
• People — Creation / Acceleration, through talent quality, productivity, and retention.
• Legal — Protection, by removing blockers and managing risk.

When a whole company understands which mechanism it owns, you stop having the "that's not my job" conversation about revenue.

How do you know if you have product-market fit — or go-to-market fit?

Product-market fit and go-to-market fit are two different milestones, and where you are determines what your revenue team should be doing right now. Plenty of teams think they're further along than they are, so I use a three-part test. You have product-market fit when all three are true:

1. Outsized value — a set of customers get value so clearly that they'd be genuinely upset to lose you.
2. A meaningful number — enough of those customers that it isn't a fluke or one heroic account.
3. Commercially viable — those customers are profitable to serve, not a drain on your team.

Product-market fit means you've proven the value with a meaningful number of viable customers. Go-to-market fit is the next milestone: you've found at least one repeatable, scalable way to acquire more of them. The reason it matters is sequencing — pre-fit, your job is to find the fit; post-fit, it's to make acquisition repeatable; at go-to-market fit, it's to scale and defend it. Automating or pouring spend into a motion before you've proven it just scales a guess.

I want to be clear about where this thinking comes from. The three-part test builds directly on Mark Roberge's work on product-market fit — he built and ran sales at HubSpot from the early days through IPO scale, and wrote The Sales Acceleration Formula, so when he frames what "fit" actually looks like and how it changes what a revenue team should do, it's earned. My contribution here is synthesis, not invention.

What does a revenue-centric culture actually look like?

A revenue-centric culture rests on four values — Transparency, Accountability, Alignment, and Focus — and they're meant for the revenue teams (sales, marketing, client success), even though the rest of the org usually benefits too.

• Transparency — there's nowhere to hide, in a good way. Numbers are open, so problems surface early instead of at quarter-end.
• Accountability — you've got this, but we're here to support. People own their numbers and aren't left alone with them.
• Alignment — it's all revenue, just different ways of helping to get it. Marketing, sales, and CS optimize for the same outcome, not their own vanity metrics.
• Focus — if we just do revenue, we win (within an acceptable cost framework). Saying no to the off-strategy work is the whole discipline.

Be honest that installing this is a transition, not a switch. Some people thrive in it; some leave — and that sorting is part of the point. You'll scare off the people who weren't going to drive revenue and attract the ones who will. It only works if leadership models it first.

Where do you start?

Start by picking which of the five ways you're going to pull — you can't push all five at once — and build a bottom-up plan to do it. Peter Drucker put the whole point of the exercise in one line decades ago, and it still holds: the purpose of a business is to create and keep a customer. Everything above is just the modern machinery for doing exactly that. So:

1. Decide where you are — pre-fit, product-market fit, or go-to-market fit — because that decides the work.
2. Pick one or two of the five levers with the most headroom for the next 12 months.
3. Get the motion right by hand, establish your baselines, then automate to scale.
4. Forecast bottom-up from real metrics, and make the goals SMART — specific, measurable, achievable, relevant, time-bound.

Five levers, one foundation (know your customer), and the discipline to sequence them. That's the whole game.

FAQ

Michael Gaudet is the founder of Eighty Twenty CMO, a fractional CMO practice for venture-backed B2B SaaS companies. He was employee #63 at Benevity through its $1B+ exit, has delivered 20 full 12-week engagements, serves as Executive in Residence at Co.Labs, and holds an MBA from the Haskayne School of Business.