Ventana Research is happy to share insights gleaned from the latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The 2022 Revenue Performance Management (RPM) Value Index is the distillation of a year of market and product research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to vendors supporting the spectrum of revenue performance management. Using this methodology, we evaluated vendor submissions in seven categories: five relevant to the Product Experience ﹘ Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability ﹘ and two related to the Customer Experience ﹘ Total Cost of Ownership or Return on Investment and Vendor Validation.
Value Index for Revenue Performance Management Rates Vendors
Topics: Sales, Sales Performance Management (SPM), Price and Revenue Management, sales enablement, Revenue Performance Management
Why Your ERP and CRM Won’t Transform Your Business
Digital Transformation. The Subscription Economy. Omni-Channel Selling. Customer Centric. These are all terms used to label trends and events that are changing the way business is being conducted, a change that has accelerated due to recent events. Regardless of the terminology, there is no doubt that the way vendors and buyers are interacting, whether B2C or B2B, is different today for many organizations than it was even five years ago. But to be fair, no technology on its own can transform your business without changes to the other two key elements: people and processes. In addition, change is unlikely to happen if you are also relying on your existing ERP or CRM systems.
Topics: Sales, Digital Commerce, subscription management, partner management, Revenue Management
Why Finance and Legal are Important to Revenue and Sales Operations
There is much vendor activity and customer interest in making better use of data, to improve the sales process in the face of increased pressure to achieve organization revenue goals. As detailed in my Analyst Perspective: The Art and Science of Sales from the “Inside Out," enhanced buyer research as well as the inclusion of more people in the buying process, have made selling harder, evidenced by a general trend of declining quota attainment. There is no denying that better use of data can help in prioritizing and helping to advance the sales process more effectively. But this is not the whole story. Whereas generating interest and qualifying opportunity is a key part of the sales team’s role, all this progress can be undone with a cumbersome and clunky configure, price and quoting (CPQ) and contract life cycle management (CLM) process. Automated and digitized systems that handle these elements aid greatly toward a winning/successful close process and will set the right tenor for a continuing and sustained customer relationship. And although CPQ is often thought of as part of the finance department, as contracts are with legal, both of these processes should be seen as adjuncts of the sales process, and both sales and revenue leadership and operations teams need to align with finance and legal. My colleague Robert Kugel covers the finance perspective in more detail in his Analyst Perspective: Configure, Price and Quote Software Supports Profitability Management.
Topics: Sales, Revenue Management, Sales Engagement, Revenue Performance Management
Improving the State of Analytics in Organizations
Despite all the advances organizations have made with respect to analytics, our most recent research shows the majority of the workforce in the majority of organizations are not using analytics and business intelligence (BI). Less than one-quarter (23%) report that one-half or more of their workforce is using analytics and BI. This is a problem. It means organizations are not enabling their workforce to perform at peak efficiency and effectiveness. It means the workforce in many organizations does not have access to the same information by which they are being measured. It means organizations must find other ways to communicate with, and manage, the workforce.
Topics: Sales, business intelligence, embedded analytics, Analytics, Data, Sales Performance Management, Digital Technology, Digital Commerce, natural language processing, subscription management, partner management, Revenue Management, Sales Engagement, Collaborative & Conversational Computing
Xactly Advances Support for Revenue Performance Management
Revenue performance management and the role of revenue operations is moving to the forefront of sales organizations, aligning departments around a single view of the business with shared revenue targets and goals. This facilitates the needs of the sales department as well as customer experience, marketing and renewals. The concept of RevOps does not yet have a widely shared common definition within organizations. Because revenue organizations include workers associated with sales operations, there tends to be a bias that RevOps leans towards sales management with the addition of customer success for retention and marketing.
Topics: Sales, Customer Experience, Marketing, Sales Performance Management, partner management, Revenue Management, Sales Engagement, Revenue Performance Management
