Perhaps the staff being reduced were getting in the way of winning deals. That would increase revenue nicely because those deals would stop being held up in bureaucracy, allowing revenue to start coming in. Perhaps those staff are the ones insisting Mainframe is still relevant in the cloud age, again losing otherwise winnable deals. Getting rid of the Watson marketing division would be good too, because then they could afford technical staff to actually make Watson do what it's sold to do rather than inventing ever more things IBM wished it could do. Or get rid of both departments and just forward traffic from the Watson URL to Cortana/Alexa/Siri/Indian call centre.
So yes, there are plenty of ways staff cuts could increase revenues. But no, not directly, that's just silly.