Gartner, Inc. predicts by 2025, 75% of the highest growth companies in the world will deploy a revenue operations (RevOps) model. So it’s no surprise that revenue intelligence solutions have rapidly become a must-have for forward-thinking businesses.
If you are considering adding revenue intelligence to your sales tech stack, there are some key things to consider. Companies that focus on investing in the right integrated revenue intelligence and enablement solutions are the ones who will achieve truly healthy deal pipelines. Embracing a 360-degree, single-pane-of-glass approach to buyer intelligence can help every member of your revenue team to do their job better, more effectively, and efficiently. It will also enable you to forecast more accurately, deliver predictable and efficient growth, and, most importantly, give you a comprehensive view of pipeline health.
The Revenue Intelligence Puzzle
In today’s selling environment, understanding what deals are likely to close and likely to renew is difficult. Many companies try to solve this by relying on partial insights from siloed solutions, including CRM or qualitative feedback from revenue teams after meetings. While this can be helpful, revenue teams miss a critical piece of the puzzle: the opportunity to see a holistic view of the entire deal pipeline, break down silos and gain visibility and insight — all while achieving accurate forecasts.
According to Forrester, at least one-third of businesses forecast with non-qualitative methods. Depending on scope and scale, organizations can spend as much as 100 hours a week generating pipeline forecasts yet continue to miss their expectations by 15-20%. The existing process is inaccurate and inefficient and exists more as a liability for organizations with no visibility into which deals will or will not close.
Revenue Intelligence 101
While there are sales technology platforms that are effective at analyzing critical customer data points from sales activities, revenue teams lack an integrated mix of intelligence solutions to accurately indicate the overall health of a deal. Packaging multichannel content engagement, value engagement, and buyer intent into one central hub can fuel revenue intelligence in a way that drives actual results. When revenue teams can expand data collection and visibility to include the content, value, and intent metrics, they know which deals to chase and nurture, because of a 360-degree view of both the opportunity and the forecast, as well as post-sale insights.
With a constantly evolving market, how do you define the terms and concepts that make up revenue intelligence and understand the power of each one to achieve a holistic, results-driven revenue intelligence solution for your customers?
Revenue Intelligence: The solutions required to support a RevOps model. Revenue Intelligence solutions capture human engagement activity between buyers and sellers and automatically upload that data to CRM platforms. These solutions include:
Content engagement and content intelligence: This is a critical piece of the revenue intelligence puzzle. As buyers become increasingly digital, they’re doing more self-service research and relying less on sales reps to provide the information they need to make a purchase decision. A new survey from market research firm FocusVision found that the average B2B buyer’s journey involves the consumption of 13 pieces of content.
Content engagement data shows:
- The content that was shared in and after meetings
- What content has been shared at each stage of the journey and lifecycle
- How the content has been consumed by the buyer
- How the content was shared with other key members of the buying committee
- Which specific content components do stakeholders interact with and for how long
Sales Activity: This data is collected via Customer Relationship Management (CRM) and Conversation Intelligence solutions that track sales activity like lead scoring, order history, and customer interaction records.
Sales activity data shows:
- What meetings have been conducted and who attended
- Communications to the buying group, such as emails and phone calls
- Conversations and intelligence on what has been communicated plus the construct/sentiment of the communications
- The progression of the deal through the sales stages
- The cadence of interactions
Buyer Intent: Behavior signals of buyers are aggregated via Sales and ABM technologies to enable revenue teams to identify buyers in an active buying cycle.
Buyer intent data indicates:
- Whether an organization is actively looking for a solution in your market segment
- How an account interacts with your website and community content
- How an account interacts with other sites, from 3rd party trusted sources and your competitors
Value Engagement: Value report output from marketing, sales, or customer success tools such as ROI, TCO, or Realized Value calculators.
Value engagement data shows:
- The key objectives and challenges the buyer would like to address
- The use cases and solutions proposed
- The cost of “do nothing” with the legacy solutions and status quo (the pain)
- The predicted outcomes from proposed solutions
- The estimated investment and expected return on investment (ROI)
- How well the buyer has performed on previous projects, with solving challenges, implementing use cases, and achieving predicted outcomes and realized ROI
Revenue Operations (RevOps): RevOps is a business function that aims to maximize an organization’s revenue potential. Organizations are moving toward implementing RevOps strategies to align and improve the performance of commercial teams (marketing, sales, post-sales) accountable to revenue.
Revenue Teams: Anyone customer-facing: primarily marketers, sales reps, and post-sales (e.g., customer success or account management).
The Future is Fusion
The Jenga-like tech stack problem is a universal one for businesses. Revenue operations leverage innumerable systems, including CRM, conversation intelligence, content management, ABM, learning management, value engagement, marketing automation, and more. While there’s no doubt that each element of the revenue tech stack has a gold mine of information to inform the forecast, it leaves revenue teams to manage data on separate islands. As a consequence, an abundance of valuable insight goes unnoticed. Approaching revenue intelligence holistically results in more accurate forecasts, more prescriptive recommendations, and ultimately, more deals won.
Want to learn more about the future of revenue intelligence and enablement? Check out our recorded webinar on How sales leaders can improve forecast accuracy, enhance buyer engagement, and accelerate revenue in 2022.
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