Every sales organization eventually faces the same decision, and most of them get it wrong in the same way. Your top rep has carried the number for three years running. When a team leadership seat opens, promoting your best sales rep to manager feels less like a choice and more like an obligation. It reads…

You can do everything else in this series right. Name the dependence, find the assets, choose the model, price it, market it, measure the margin. And it can still die in one board meeting, because the earned-revenue strategy that never gets board buy-in is just a memo in a drawer. Boards are built to be…

Here is the quiet failure mode of nonprofit earned revenue. An organization launches a paid program, revenue comes in, everyone celebrates the new line on the budget, and no one notices that it loses money on every unit sold. The gross number looks like progress. The net number, once you count the staff time no…

The moment a nonprofit starts selling something, a problem appears that no one warned it about. Development and earned revenue begin competing for the same brand. The homepage that used to speak to donors now has to speak to buyers too. The email list that expected appeals now gets pitches. And somewhere inside the organization,…

A nonprofit builds a good earned-revenue offer, prices it well, and then markets it the only way it knows how: by telling the story of its impact. The campaign is moving, the community shares it, and almost no one buys. The offer wasn’t the problem. The organization brought donor marketing to a buyer’s decision, and…

Ask a nonprofit leader what to charge for a new offering and watch the discomfort arrive. The number they land on is almost always too low, and it is too low for a reason that has nothing to do with the market. Nonprofits rarely have a pricing problem. They have a guilt problem that shows…