7 Quick Ways to Unlock Potential Revenue for Your Business

Current income streams are important for maintaining operations. But identifying and unlocking potential revenue can open new pathways for sustainable and scalable business growth.
Potential revenue represents future income opportunities that have yet to be realized, and unlocking them demands a proactive, forward-looking approach. For finance professionals, the ability to forecast and capture future revenue streams is vital for strategic, long-term planning and success.

The Priority Commerce Engine unifies payables, merchant services, and banking and treasury solutions to help businesses streamline financial operations and capture new revenue opportunities.
But before diving into strategy, it’s important to build a clear understanding of what potential revenue is, how it differs from other financial projections, and how to accurately calculate it.

Key takeaways

• Potential revenue refers to the total possible income a business could generate. It plays a critical role in long-term growth planning and demonstrating future earning potential to investors and stakeholders.
• Calculating potential revenue requires identifying revenue streams, estimating sales volumes, setting pricing, and tracking key metrics like monthly recurring revenue (MRR) and committed monthly recurring revenue (CMRR).
• Organizations can unlock potential revenue by diversifying offerings, optimizing pricing, and leveraging automation to accelerate revenue capture.

What is potential revenue?

Potential revenue refers to the total possible income a business could generate from its current operations, customers, and markets, assuming optimal conditions. It captures what could be achieved rather than what is currently being realized, which offers a critical lens for evaluating business growth beyond immediate sales.

It’s important to distinguish potential revenue from similar concepts like estimated revenue, forecasted revenue, and projected income. While these terms all involve financial projections, they differ in scope and purpose.

Estimated revenue typically reflects a rough calculation based on available information, but lacks certainty. Forecasted revenue uses historical data and predictive analytics to project future earnings with greater precision, while projected income considers broader variables such as costs and market shifts to estimate profitability.

On the other hand, potential revenue focuses solely on the maximum earning opportunities available, often including recurring income streams like subscriptions or renewals that provide predictability across the sales cycle.

Why companies need to define their potential revenue

It’s important for organizations to determine their potential revenue because it reflects growth opportunities and helps strengthen valuations. There are several ways defining potential revenue can shape growth and future success, including:

• Improve strategic planning
• Influence valuations or investment
• Mitigate risk

Improve strategic planning

A clear understanding of potential revenue equips businesses with a blueprint for growth. It enables organizations to identify the most effective strategies for scaling operations, expanding into new markets, or launching new products, features, and services. By identifying the greatest opportunities for revenue generation, organizations can allocate resources accordingly and prioritize initiatives that drive the greatest impact.

Influence valuations or investment

A well-documented potential revenue estimate can be a major differentiator for businesses seeking funding, partnerships, or considering a future sale. It demonstrates not just where a business stands today but highlights its future earning capacity. This forward-looking view plays an important role in shaping company valuations and attracting investor interest.

Mitigate risk

Mapping potential revenue streams allows businesses to diversify their income and reduce reliance on any single market or customer base. Proactively identifying and cultivating new revenue opportunities helps organizations strengthen their resilience against market volatility, rising operational expenses like the cost of tariffs, and unforeseen disruptions. This flexibility enhances long-term financial stability and supports sustained growth.

Metrics to measure potential revenue

Quantifying potential revenue involves tracking several important metrics that provide insight into the stability, predictability, and growth potential of an organization’s income streams.

Monthly recurring revenue (MRR)

MRR measures the predictable, recurring income a company generates each month from its active customer base, especially in subscription-based models or standing orders. It serves as a baseline for evaluating current revenue health and forecasting future growth potential.

Committed monthly recurring revenue (CMRR)

CMRR takes MRR a step further by factoring in signed contracts that have yet to start billing, and adjusting for anticipated customer churn and downgrades. This metric provides a more conservative estimate of recurring revenue because it accounts for both upcoming gains and expected losses, making it particularly useful for financial planning and investment evaluations.

The average revenue per customer (ARPC)

Often measured monthly or annually, ARPC calculates the average revenue generated from each customer. By dividing total revenue by the number of active customers, this figure helps businesses assess customer value, set realistic growth targets, and identify opportunities for upselling, cross-selling, or even refining pricing strategies to drive potential revenue gains.

How to calculate potential revenue

Learning how to calculate your potential revenue gives you a clearer, more detailed picture of where your future earnings could come from. By examining factors like revenue streams, sales volumes, and pricing strategies, you can uncover realistic growth opportunities and spot potential risks before they impact your bottom line.

Step 1: Identify your revenue streams

Start by listing every possible source of income, including products, services, licensing fees, subscription models, and any new offerings you are planning. Be thorough in identifying these revenue streams — even if they aren’t currently active, they represent future opportunities.

Step 2: Estimate sales volume

Analyze historical sales data, current market demand, and customer behavior trends to estimate the volume of each product or service you expect to sell. Consider trends like seasonal purchasing patterns that could influence future sales so you can forecast demand more accurately.

Step 3: Determine pricing

Set realistic price points for each offering. Conducting market analysis and competitor benchmarking can help gauge where your pricing should fall while ensuring your products remain competitive and attractive to your target audience. Additionally, consider how pricing adjustments might impact customer perception and overall demand.

Step 4: Calculate potential revenue

To calculate potential revenue, multiply the quantity of units sold by the price per unit. Use this calculation for each individual revenue stream — this can help identify which areas have the highest growth potential and deserve greater focus. You must also perform an aggregated calculation to capture your total potential earnings.

Step 5: Analyze and adjust

Review your assumptions critically. Are they realistic given current market conditions? Consider factors like emerging competitors, shifts in consumer behavior, and supply chain issues that could impact outcomes. Then, adjust projections based on known constraints or opportunities to ensure your revenue model remains resilient and adaptable.

Step 6: Monitor and update regularly

Markets change, and so do customer behaviors. To keep your business strategies aligned with market dynamics, revisit your potential revenue calculations on a regular basis, e.g., quarterly.

Quick ways to unlock revenue potential

Turning opportunities into results requires proactive strategies and ongoing execution. Here are seven quick strategies you can implement to unlock revenue potential:

1. Leverage customer feedback

Customer feedback offers direct insight into unmet needs and gaps in services or products. Regularly gather feedback through surveys, customer interviews, or support tickets to surface actionable ideas for expanding offerings or refining experiences.

2. Diversify your product or service offerings

Consider expanding your product or service mix to include complementary options like add-ons or premium versions. This helps you reach new customer segments while increasing share of wallet with existing ones. Diversification also helps reduce reliance on a narrow set of offerings.

3. Optimize pricing strategies

Reevaluating pricing models can reveal overlooked opportunities to boost revenue. Small adjustments, such as refining discount strategies, bundling complementary products, or adding flexible payment options, can increase customer spending without drastically raising acquisition costs.

Test different pricing strategies against real sales data to accelerate cash flow and customer satisfaction, ensuring pricing decisions are grounded in actual market behavior rather than assumptions.

4. Enhance your marketing efforts

Targeted marketing initiatives help expand your reach and boost customer engagement. Tactics like data-driven personalization, targeted paid advertising, and SEO-powered online content help attract new prospects while encouraging repeat business from existing customers — all of which contribute to potential revenue growth.

5. Improve customer retention

It’s often more cost-effective and profitable to retain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones. Prioritize retention-boosting initiatives like implementing loyalty programs and offering proactive customer support to continuously add value to existing relationships and improve customer lifetime value.

6. Explore strategic partnerships

Partnerships with complementary businesses can open access to untapped markets and customer bases. Joint ventures and revenue-sharing agreements can expand your brand’s reach and accelerate growth opportunities faster than building new channels independently.

7. Invest in technology and automation

Leveraging automated payment technology can help you unlock revenue potential by streamlining back-office processes, reducing payment errors, and improving cash flow management. The right accounts payables solutions automate and simplify invoicing, approvals, and reconciliation, which frees up time for your team while ensuring accuracy in your financial operations. As a result, you can operate more efficiently and capitalize on early payment discounts.

Boost your business revenue with Priority

Transforming potential revenue into real results requires a strategic approach backed by the right tools. By strengthening your forecasting capabilities, improving how you track recurring revenue metrics, and automating revenue capture, you can turn potential income into measurable business growth.

Priority helps you capture and accelerate potential revenue through its Priority Commerce Engine solution, which integrates payables, merchant services, and banking and treasury functions on a single platform. With capabilities like real-time cash flow visibility, payment automation, and streamlined fund movement, Priority enables you to forecast revenue more accurately, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and convert projected earnings into realized growth.

Get in touch with Priority to unlock greater value from every opportunity.