By Itoro Uwemakpan

I could start with the rhetoric that says every profit-oriented company exists to make profit, so every role in the business should be geared and engineered towards that goal. This is a position I totally go by.

Having worked with a good number of developers, creatives and copywriters, one underwhelming commonality remains conspicuous – low level business revenue literacy.

This meant that I had an ancillary job of nurturing a bottom-line mentality in every staff member I worked with, because quite a number of them felt “all they did was what they did”. Write a catchy copy, create an attractive design – but to what end?

I believe a part of the employee on boarding process in startups should encourage a mindset that focuses on how each role can potentially affect the company’s revenue.

What are revenue-functional roles? Revenue-functional roles are the positions in an organisation, where responsibilities and activities directly impact revenue generation. While these roles may vary materially depending on the nature, structure and business industry; they perform specific functions that contribute to or enable the overall revenue-generating strategy of your business.

Chiefly, these functions form the bedrock for building a company towards meeting its product objectives and growth expectations. There are several objectives that define the paradigm of roles per time, for example, a company may be interested in just building awareness, using a free-tier model to increase customer acquisition and usage, etc.

But the larger goal is to see how the awareness created can build a brand connection and affinity which would in turn enhance customer conversion, or how the customers acquired on a free-tier can become brand ambassadors and can have reasons to try out a next level paid option.

The introductory or first layer is Marketing. While branding and marketing have been and can be used interchangeably, they are clearly different. Branding crafts brand identity and appeal, Marketing builds a sustainable connection and interest with the customers that can trigger a path to acquisition, this can be long term, or short term.

Sales is another role that overlaps, this time with business development. Sales has existed as long as man has, so you can call it the eldest of the four. Sales is crucial because it’s the connecting line that stands in-between Marketing and Revenue.

Sales identities leads, sifts and sorts out potential customers while ensuring that the prospects are fully sold out to the services and solutions the product offers with the end goal of conversion.

Though sales in most cases is about the transaction (leading to users, revenue, etc), business development is about growing the business. While it includes increasing revenue, it equally includes building strategic partnerships (that leads to sales), business expansion to improve profitability. One thing to note is that great business developers are good sales people.

While this is less common, the revenue manager has oversight of Sales and BD operations.

While their focus is not on the sales action, they are more interested in the results, and how it influences the companies revenue goals. The RM is tasked with maximizing and optimizing all direct revenue-generating activities.

The role requires a knowledge of business strategy, market and competition analytics, pricing and business development.

A revenue manager should not be confused with a Chief Financial Officer (CFO). A CFO’s job is to manage the company’s finances.

Companies that make the most of these roles are those that know how to properly build working cross-functional systems. There would always be overlap, but only means each role is important to the other and not lesser, depending on corporate plans and strategies.

Entry roles and leadership structure

Entry roles include; Branding and Marketing: Brand executive, brand manager, senior brand manager, brand and marketing manager, marketing communications manager

Salles and Business Development: Sales executive, sales manager, senior sales manager, leads manager, account manage, business development manager, partnership manager

Leadership roles: Head of marketing, Head of sales, Head of business developments & partnerships, Revenue manager

Founders and company executives must understand the importance of clearly defined roles. It ensures job functions are well laid out and aids easy absorption of new staff into a working system as well as enhances productivity.

*Itoro Uwemakpan is a Partnership and Expansion Manager at Transsion Holding, the largest smartphone and consumer products developer in Africa. He leads strategic direction and operations in the mobile internet division, across a range of products with combined usage of over 100 million active users (MAU).

He’s a dynamic partnerships and marketing leader with close to eight years of experience, skilled at fostering commercial partnerships that enable digital-first companies to thrive.