What keeps revenue leaders up at night?
According to a recent Forrester Consulting study of more than 300 revenue decision-makers at high-growth U.S. SaaS companies, it’s a lack of understanding around the opportunity for cross-sales on their accounts. Nearly 40% citing that as “challenging.” At the same time, gaining visibility into the current quarter’s pipeline is the most acute problem they face, with one in five flagging that as “very challenging.”
Other headaches: tracking renewal revenue and churn and leveraging real-time data for forecasting, which almost one third of revenue leaders say is “challenging.”
For anyone in sales, this probably isn’t surprising.
What is surprising is the degree to which revenue leaders may be unaware of the tools available to address many of these issues. Seven in 10 said their revenue process and execution strategies are mature, but the challenges related to forecasting, opportunity spotting, and churn suggests otherwise.
The answer lies in revenue operations, the end-to-end business process of driving predictable revenue, across marketing, sales, renewals, and expansion, through transparency and execution rigor. Platforms like Clari enable revenue operations by gathering real-time data from across the businesses and then using artificial intelligence to generate execution insights.
Here’s a look at the weak points causing some of those headaches mentioned above, and how a modern revenue operations solution can help.
Revenue decision-makers lack capabilities in key areas
Revenue operations gives decision-makers intelligent revenue insights and the ability to automatically capture the activity and data that form those insights. However, most of the executives Forrester surveyed lacked these capabilities in key areas:
Business intelligence
Only 26% of respondents said they had integrated business intelligence into their revenue process. This is probably because most BI platforms don’t cater to sales, but rather executives outside the revenue organization who are focused on supply chains or multi-channel marketing campaigns. Sales leaders have different business intelligence needs to help them make better use of their sellers, for example, or manage territories.
What does that look like in practice? Clari customers, for example, can export data using the Clari API to analyze the accuracy of their reps’ forecasts. If one rep is under-forecasting quarter after quarter and that skews your outlook, you can coach them to improve their forecasts the next time around.
Similarly, you can analyze territories based on external metrics (addressable ARR, emerging industries) and internal metrics (pipeline, past sales activity) to create balanced territory loads across reps, which can reduce the chance any one rep or territory lags another due to forces outside their control.
CRM automations
Just a quarter of respondents to Forrester’s study reported having automated CRMs. That’s a red flag for a number of reasons, not least because it implies their teams are using manual processes to log opportunity and activity data. Doing so is time-consuming and tedious, and results in a major loss of data.
When reps are asked to manually enter their activity, 70% of the buyers they meet with aren’t logged. Without a centralized store of prospect and customer interactions, leaders are bound to miss critical insights into account health, cross-sell, and expansion opportunities.
Clari uses AI to capture all pre- and post-sale account activity automatically—from emails, calendars, CRMS, and customer messaging tools—saving reps and customer success time. This also ensures that executives have the information they need to forecast in real time, make quick gap-to-goal assessments, and steer the team accordingly.
Analytics into pipeline management
Only one in five respondents to the Forrester study said they’re using pipeline management and buyer interaction analytics for revenue process management. Those who aren’t might lack critical sightlines into the revenue engine—the kind that can dramatically improve executive decision-making at both the opportunity/account level and across the wider go-to-market strategy.
Clari allows you to build sales dashboards that surface insights from across your pipeline to get an accurate, real-time picture of pipeline risk and upside, as well as deal flow and prospect engagement.
The result: You can spot trends in terms of where deals are veering off course and correct the playbook, and you can easily get a sense of where key new-logo, expansion, or upsell opportunities are before the quarter closes by measuring current prospect and customer engagement, and steering resources to the most promising opportunities.
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