Revenue and Sales Operations

What Volume IV covers

The four instruments that make a composition visible, rather than reporting the total and calling it the result.

Why margin is the only number in a business with no owner and no incentive attached to it. The platform is paid on orders. Staff are paid on hours, which rise with orders. The rep is paid on revenue booked. Nobody is paid on the number that tells you whether any of it was worth doing.

And what research on nearly eight thousand enterprise software deals shows about what happens to any number people are paid against.

The argument

Every revenue figure is a blend of channels, products and customers carrying different margins, and the top line reports the total while the composition moves underneath it. A business can add units, add revenue, and lose money on every marginal unit, and nothing on the surface will show it, because everything on the surface counts units.

It is not corrected because nobody is paid to correct it. And the person best placed to notice is usually pointed somewhere else, because they came to the business through the craft rather than through the numbers.

What this book is not

The subject is what altitude a number is reported at. The figures in the case it opens with are correct at the altitude they are reported from, which is exactly why nobody questions them.

It is also not a restaurant book. The anchor case is a restaurant. The argument is general, and the author says so explicitly.

Where it sits

Volume IV maps to NBOP-CPR, the Revenue and Sales Operations endorsement. Volume I covers the core practice and maps to NBOP-CP. Volume II maps to NBOP-CPI and Volume III to NBOP-CPM.

Four of the six volumes are written. Volumes V and VI apply the standard inside the remaining endorsement niches and are still to come. All six are written before anything publishes.

First editions are pre endorsement data by design. Second editions follow once the assessment has produced data of its own.

Availability

Written, not yet published No price, no purchase link and no ISBN until the listing exists. The page count is not published because typesetting is not final.