The MoneyWheel. A Product Manager Tool to Scale SaaS Revenues
SaaS Sales Transaction Pattern Analysis Can Yield Fascinating Results
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Scaling product revenues is a challenge for all product managers and product marketers. Once a product graduates from the early adopter stage of the Technology Adoption Life Cycle, there are patterns in successful sales transactions. Product people should learn these patterns. The MoneyWheel is a tool you can use to discover and scale repeatable sales transactions to drive revenue growth.
Backstory
In the 1990s I worked for an enterprise software firm that sold enterprise application development tools (CASE tools). A challenge we faced was that some sales regions and sales reps were much more successful than others. We started a project to learn why. The MoneyWheel was an analytical technique we built. What we discovered was that there were patterns to the sales transactions of the most successful sales reps.
Sales wins fell into specific ‘buckets’. These buckets represented common reasons why customers decided to purchase a new solution. The most successful reps recognized these patterns and used them to quickly qualify or disqualify specific opportunities. They invested their time in the most promising deals. We found that specific sales regions and sales reps were more skilled at exploiting these patterns than others. By sharing these best practices we were able to improve the performance of the lowest-performing sales reps. This drove an increase in revenues and profits.
MoneyWheel Basics: Categories & Spokes
The MoneyWheel is a tool you can use to understand the repeatable sales transactions that occur in your product’s market. This knowledge helps you make better decisions about feature prioritization. You can also use it to make better decisions about investments in demand generation programs.
A MoneyWheel has two components: categories and spokes. A MoneyWheel category is a broad type of sales transaction. There are five broad categories:
