What is Hidden Revenue?
Hidden revenue describes the untapped opportunities you miss simply because you’re unaware of them.
It takes a few different forms:
- Website visitors that don’t convert. No one browses a B2B website for fun, but if those visitors don’t fill out a form or book a call, those opportunities are hidden and lost.
- Lapsed or inactive customers. Former clients might be ready to give you another try, but you’ll never know until they reach out.
- Cross-sell opportunities. Your current customer base might be the perfect fit for more of your services, or complementary ones, but you can’t see who they are.
- Challenges with marketing funnels and neglected channels. Sometimes prospects might fall outside of the traditional funnel or come from an unexplored channel, which leaves them hidden because they’re not counted in other activity.
Why Pursue Hidden Revenue?
If your sales targets need a quick boost, targeting businesses that are already aware of you – and interested in your website – can be an easy win.
And because these leads take less time to close than cold ones, it’s like a cheat code to generating immediate income.
There are other reasons to go after hidden revenue:
- When you squeeze out every opportunity from leads, you improve the ROI of marketing activity, which helps to drive profits.
- Up-selling to your current customers can increase their lifetime value, which is a major driver of business growth.
- Identifying these missed opportunities can fix issues with marketing funnels and lead to new processes, which means less revenue will be hidden in the future.
Uncovering your hidden revenue is a high-impact tactic that requires relatively low effort and can inject cash into the business. And it’s something you can start doing right now.
In fact, this was the topic of one of our webinars. Tyler Webb Harding, director of strategy-first marketing agency StrategiQ, joined us to share his tips on how you can tap into your missed revenue opportunities.
Tip 1: Know Your Customer, and Keep Knowing Them
One of Tyler’s golden rules for finding your hidden revenue? “Know your customer. Know the journey you’re wanting them to go on. Know the problem you’re solving.”
But it doesn’t stop there.
Your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) should be a living, breathing document. It needs to evolve with market conditions, competitive shifts, and technological change. That means you should review your ICP and marketing strategy quarterly to ensure you’re still relevant and your outreach is still precise enough.
Tools like visitor identification software will help you get better insights on the hidden prospects that align with your ICP. By identifying the businesses browsing your site, you can uncover high value prospects before they even fill out a form.
These warm leads can be a game-changer, as warm calling converts at a much higher rate than cold calling.
Tip 2: Stop Guessing and Start Measuring Buyer Intent
To unlock hidden revenue, sales teams need to spot buyer intent signals early.
Tyler suggests monitoring indicators like:
- Repeat website visits
- Time spent on key service pages
- Engagement with webinars, blogs, or whitepapers
It becomes even more powerful when you can identify which businesses are looking at specific pages on your website.
For example, imagine a lapsed customer has looked at your pricing page twice in the last week. Or a lead that went cold has suddenly started reading about your features again. In both cases, a quick call could be all that stands between you and some hidden revenue.
Tip 3: Reignite Old Opportunities
We all know that winning over lapsed customers can be more cost-effective than acquiring new ones. So, if you get an alert that a lapsed customer is back on your website, don’t overthink it!
Revisit your previous interactions with them to refresh your memory of their challenges and any objections they had. Think about how you’re now better positioned to help them and reach back out.
Remember: simplicity, relevance, and persistence are more important than gimmicks.
Tip 4: Focus Beats Scale
Not every B2B organization has a big budget or a huge team, and that’s okay.
Tyler’s advice to small businesses is simple but powerful: “Do one thing really well rather than ten things poorly.”
Instead of spreading limited resources across too many tactics, find out what works and double-down on that.
For example, if cold calling is giving you stellar results, stick with it—but consider how adding warm leads to the mix could help you find even more revenue opportunities.
He also recommends leveraging partnerships, like co-hosting webinars or setting up referral programs, to increase your reach without inflating costs.
Tip 5: Automate Where Possible
Modern automation tools can help even lean teams punch above their weight.
Even something as simple as automatically routing alerts and leads to the right sales rep can save you plenty of time, which you can reinvest into selling.
As Tyler shared, automation lets you be proactive. For example, starting every day reviewing the automated daily reports of website visits from key accounts will let you strike while the iron is hot.
Tip 6: Set a Goal and Work Backwards
When you’re focused on finding the hidden revenue, it can help if you have a clear goal or destination to aim for.
Tyler referenced the concept of “marginal gains” made famous by Sir Dave Brailsford, the performance director behind British Cycling’s Olympic success. The principle? Improve every small factor by just 1% and you’ll create a massive competitive edge over time.
In B2B sales, this means identifying a clear goal, whether it’s revenue growth, customer retention, or market expansion, and then reverse-engineering the KPIs and tactics you need to get there.
Tip 7: Keep It Simple, Always
The most useful piece of advice from the webinar is perhaps the most basic: don’t overcomplicate things.
Whether you’re scaling a campaign, refining your ICP, or chasing marginal gains, simplicity wins. Focus on what matters most: your customer, their journey, and how you uniquely solve their problems.
As Tyler said, if you can’t clearly articulate who your customer is, what journey you want them to take, and what problem you solve, it’s time to go back to square one.
Ready to Discover Hidden Revenue on Your Site?
Lead Forensics helps you see which companies are engaging with your website, even if they don’t fill out a form. It’s the secret to uncovering missed revenue opportunities, and you can try it for free. Book a demo now to see how it can help your business.
