When asked about our revenue enablement and operations predictions for 2022, the one priority that stands out the most to us, and what we believe 2022 will be all about is Revenue Intelligence.
So, what is Revenue Intelligence and why is this so important that we are declaring 2022 to be the Year of Revenue Intelligence?
Revenue intelligence is a new way of running your commercial organization, using facts including sales activity, customer content engagement, value engagement and buyer intent to better understand and prioritize opportunities, generate more predictable forecasts and leverage artificial intelligence to guide better actions and sales performance.
When it comes to why, there are several critical challenges that revenue intelligence can help address.
According to Todd Abbott, CEO of InsightSquared (recently acquired by Mediafly) indicates that sales executive tenures, especially at small and mid-sized firms, are reaching an all time low, mostly because of missed revenue goals. And meeting or exceeding goals will be more important than ever in 2022.
In order to reverse this tenure and performance shortfall trend, Chief Revenue and Sales Officers need to make their revenue performance more predictable, but this has proven to be extremely elusive. A recent Hubspot study indicates that individual sales reps have a forecast accuracy rate of only 75%. and looking in aggregate, 80% of companies miss sales forecasts by 25% or more, according to MillerHeiman.
And this is not for the lack of effort and time spent, as Hubspot reports the average sales rep squanders 2.5 hours each week on forecasting, not to mention the additional waste of managers and execs in forecasting reviews and meetings, as well as analysts who collect and analyze data to support the predictions.
Overall, there is a decided lack of data and science being applied. When sales leaders were recently surveyed by Forrester Consulting (Outreach), they indicated that 28% of forecasts were still based on seller self-estimates and 23% leveraging select deal inspections and gut feel. Noise and bias reign.
Only 17% of organization’s approach to forecasting could be considered scientific.The rest, a whopping 83% are using spreadsheets, gut feel estimates, and as a result, do not know what opportunities are tracking correctly, where coaching and resources should be directed, and as a result have a serious blind spot to predictable revenue and performance.
Voodoo forecasting, leveraging chicken bones and entrails versus data and intelligence is no way to optimize your opportunities and manage your forecasts. As a result, we predict that with platforms and integrations to finally aggregate and analyze seller activity, content engagement, value engagement and buyer intent, Revenue Intelligence will replace voodoo forecasting and emerge as the top revenue enablement / operations priority in 2022.
Checkout these additional resources to learn more about Revenue Intelligence and why it needs to be at the top of your 2022 sales and revenue enablement / operations list:
- 154: Implementing Revenue Intelligence to Deliver Better Sales Forecasting and More Predictable Revenue (w/ Todd Abbott CEO of InsightSquared) https://open.spotify.com/episode/4vyUcc5qGX6fRPdTKoMxAC
- Revenue Intelligence: Leveraging Activity, Engagement and Intent for Better Sales Forecasting – https://www.mediafly.com/evolved-selling-community-blog/revenue-intelligence-leveraging-activity-engagement-and-intent-for-better-sales-forecasting/
- On-Demand Webinar: 2022 B2B Trends Sales Executives Won’t Want to Miss (w/ Forrester) – https://www.mediafly.com/evolved-selling-community-blog/2022-b2b-trends-sales-executives-wont-want-to-miss/
- Five Revenue Enablement Predictions to make your 2022 a Success – https://www.mediafly.com/evolved-selling-community-blog/five-revenue-enablement-predictions-to-make-your-2022-a-success/
#salesforecasting #revenueintelligence #revenueoperations
Comments are closed.