You need a revenue platform that allows you to ingest and leverage all of your revenue signals to drive a simple and predictable revenue cadence across your team. But how do you separate the signals from the noise?
Consumption businesses have the advantage of gathering many metrics derived from customer usage. Is there a new spike in usage due to a new need on the customer's part? Has usage been steadily dropping off over time, indicating potential customer satisfaction issues and churn risk?
Having this much data is good—but also a challenge. Which metrics are most important to measure? For example, which are the biggest indicators of a revenue opportunity or challenge? How do you stay on top of them all when they are flowing into your systems 24/ 7? How do you drive accountability for the metrics across your go-to-market and customer success teams?
You operationalize and incorporate into your team's everyday revenue cadence—the simpler, the better. New to consumption? Check out our other post on driving growth with consumption revenue models.
The consumption model revenue cadence
Regardless of the revenue platform you are leveraging, this will be a set of revenue collaboration and governance workflows that you can deploy across your go-to-market team to drive results. It includes two main components:
A forecasting cadence (the "governance" part)
This shows how the team is performing on the key metrics you track. You may not be surprised to learn that this typically includes:
- Usage patterns by account: A trend of the last 30 days' usage by each account, indicating whether it's going up or down and how it compares to previous months, quarters, and years as relevant.
- Use case adoption: A summary of key use cases that you're driving and how each is tracking so you can identify growth areas.
- Usage and use case goals: The main purpose of the forecasting cadence is to drive accountability against key growth objectives that reps should be setting for usage and expansion in their accounts
An inspection and action cadence (the "collaboration" part)
This aligns your team on the specific motions that every person should be driving to achieve their goals. A fully integrated revenue platform that enables inspection and action should include:
- Dashboarding and analytics to determine the best strategy and go-forward plans in each account based on key metrics and trends, which also facilitates rep/manager 1:1s.
- Detailed account inspection experience that serves as a "growth console" for every rep to be the CEO of each and every account. This 360 view must bring together data from CRM, external systems, emails, meetings, calls, and any other data source relevant to understanding the state of the account.
- A "system of action": Once a strategy has been determined, the platform should provide the means to drive it. This generally includes a sales engagement system that allows you to interact with accounts in systematic ways (i.e. specific activity flows for driving new use case adoption, alerting when consumption patterns change, etc.), ways of collaborating in real-time with customers (a "mutual action plan"), and meeting recordings and transcriptions to drive next steps.
If you are running a consumption-based business, you understand what an incredible opportunity it provides but also all of the challenges that come with it. We hope this helps you think about how to implement a robust revenue cadence for your team that allows you to achieve a new level of predictable growth.
Clari's consumption forecasting allows you to drive predictability and growth in your consumption business, leveraging critical revenue signals. With Clari, you can identify revenue leak in accounts not meeting growth targets and opportunities in accounts with overages. Understanding where you stand allows you to take advantage of opportunities and mitigate risks.
At Clari, we would be delighted to discuss how we can support the needs of your business around usage, consumption-based revenue, and forecasting. Request a demo today.
