To run revenue like a process, you need a single source of truth.
To have a single source of truth, you can’t have an overflowing, bloated tech stack.
The question is: How can you make your tech tools work well together for sales and revenue? Getting it right could mean getting more done and succeeding in the revenue scene.
This blog post will cover the current state of rev/sales/marketing technology, how tech fatigue impacts revenue, what revenue leak is (and how to prevent it), and why running revenue like a process is essential.
Let’s start with a level set on where the tech space is today.
What's the current state of revenue technology, sales technology, and marketing tech?
“Pain.”
That’s Clari co-founder and CEO, Andy Byrne.
Pain is the current state of revenue, sales, and marketing technology.
As Andy is fond of saying, “This pain is the result of the three-headed hydra. In Greek mythology, the (three-headed) hydra is a multi-headed serpentine monster known for its ability to regrow two heads for each one severed. It represents a formidable challenge or an ever-growing problem where attempts to solve one issue only create more problems.
In tech-speak, the three-headed hydra looks like:
- Spreadsheets
- BI tools
- CRMs
All three are 20+-year-old systems — never purpose-built for the revenue process.
Revenue teams – from reps to executives – are not adequately equipped to run a 13-week revenue cadence. They don’t have the right tools, the best software, the ideal platform.
These teams, the most important ones in the organization, often run revenue through a CRM, but it’s not working as they hoped it would. So they take that data and export it to a spreadsheet ... and enter “Excel Hell.”
Not a great place to live.
From CRM to Excel to Business Intelligence (BI) software ... with the ultimate goals of “getting more strategic” to “aggregate data.”
This three-headed hydra – CRM >> Spreadsheets >> BI tools – is painful and time-consuming. It's manual. Everyone is using different systems. There is no single source of truth.
The net result: Tech fatigue and revenue leak.
Before we get into revenue leak, let’s explore the “too many tools” problem.
Tech Fatigue: How “too many tools” impact revenue
“When you combine the internal workflow ‘solutions’ (aka, the three-headed hydra) with the external tools (those used to connect with customers), you can quickly accumulate a lot of technology.” — Andy Bryne.
“All of this,” says Andy, “makes up the ‘proverbial swivel chair.’”
The answer is to simplify. To consolidate. To reduce spend. To “unify the experience” from rep to exec. They want “one cockpit” to be able to run both their external and internal execution workloads.
This tech fatigue is real.
Too many tools means constant switching, which negatively impacts productivity, and ultimately leads to revenue leak — the loss of revenue that results from breakdowns across the end-to-end revenue process.*
*According to Boston Consulting Group (BCG), businesses are losing over $2 trillion dollars a year due to revenue leak. In another study, Clari Labs research found that 14.9% of revenue is earned but never captured.
TL;DR:
Revenue leak is a massive problem.Revenue Leak: How to identify and eliminate it, to grow more predictable revenue
When it comes to revenue leak, the mistake many revenue leaders make,according to Andy, is they dig into the numbers to try and “figure out what’s going on.”
Instead, Andy suggests first asking your team the following:
- How are we running revenue?
- How is revenue discussed in our daily/weekly/monthly/quarterly meetings?
- Are we good (or bad) at running revenue?
- Do we even have a process?
- Can we identify that process from rep to exec?
Then, identify the revenue leak that’s happening across that 13-week cadence.
Leak examples include:
- Marketing leads never followed up on
- Large deals that slip (or are lost) for no documented reason
Andy believes the industry is shifting from revenue being a “financial number crunching process” to using technology and software platforms to actually identify that 15% of revenue leak that is happening annually.
Revenue leak is the single biggest opportunity hiding in plain sight.
Once you’ve found it, aim for total revenue precision — the predictable, repeatable ability to maximize how we drive revenue and realize that it's a process.
Finally, hire someone to manage that process.
Note: The Head of Revenue Operations is the #1 fastest-growing job in America. Why? Organizations are realizing It’s time to start running revenue like a process.
Why running revenue like a process is essential
Treating revenue as a business process — the most important business process — and mastering it, running a really tight 13-week cadence, is of utmost importance.
Having a unified platform facilitates that revenue process.
In Andy’s time with other Boards of Directors, he hears them asking their teams, “Are we executing revenue collaboration at the highest level? Are we enabling all revenue-critical employees to easily and effectively work together to run revenue?”
The result of these meetings means that instead of running slip deal reviews at the end of the quarter — after the fact, when it’s too late — teams are now having those meetings weekly.
Learn about deals with slip potential before they slip! Understand why that slip may occur: Rep issue? Product line issue? Geography issue?
But the other piece is revenue governance — the ability to control the end-to-end revenue process.
This is the responsibility of the executives. They are trying to drive more discipline, more accountability, more alignment, and control of the outcomes.
This requires a platform with easy-to-extract-insights as well as a fully unified, rep-to-boardroom user experience to quickly identify revenue leak, help revenue collaboration, optimize each 13-week cadence, and ensure all outcomes are controlled.
This is what we call Revenue Collaboration & Governance (RevCG). RevCG often involves a few steps:
- Blueprinting: helping revenue teams create a true revenue process, a cadence — go from zero to one (crawl, walk, run).
- Building a revenue cadence: every meeting of every day of every week of every month of the quarter — map it out! Identify the hotspots that can help your team drive more creation, conversion, and closing of pipeline.
Are you ready for the revenue transformation?
Transform your revenue process today
While there is “no magic path” to get there, here is a successful three-step process we’ve seen with many Clari customers:
First, perform a revenue leak assessment — up and running in a handful of days.
Next, fix your pipeline creation process by turning on our conversational intelligence and sales engagement to help create more pipeline.
Finally, dial in your forecasting issues to answer the “meet, beat, or miss” revenue question by turning on the forecasting tab.
Get started today, right now, by filling out our Revenue Leak Assessment.