Executive Summary

Revenue Performance Management

In many organizations, the sales department is being superseded by revenue teams. These revenue teams support a super-set of traditional sales functions that include not only those involved in gaining new customers, but also those with an increased focus on customer retention, expansion and cross-sell aimed at existing customers. As organizations embrace additional sales channels, whether through more typical indirect sales from partners or via new digital selling channels like e-commerce, revenue management will require an enhanced degree of alignment and coordination. The economics of multichannel selling and newer business models require the need to expand focus and resources beyond new business. This will impact not just sales and revenue teams but also marketing, partner management, commerce, subscription and customer service.

Revenue performance management (RPM) is a coordinated set of revenue-generating and related activities, processes and systems that enable organizations to plan, execute, monitor and adjust in real time to achieve customer, product and revenue targets.

To achieve these aims, leadership and planning will be key. Any time an organization transitions to new approaches and processes, there will be resistance, missteps and potential disruption. A change in the approach of strategic leadership, and in the planning, monitoring and real-time adjustments via sales or revenue operation teams, is essential. Revenue-driven organizations must manage operations with performance demands in mind and ensure consistent results every quarter, month in and month out. Revenue leaders need to implement processes that support overall strategy and growth, and also optimize both sales professional talent and the selling experience needed to achieve expectations.

The next generation of revenue and sales leaders are embracing the need to focus on creating processes that generate and project predictable revenues. Revenue performance management (RPM) as defined by Ventana Research is a coordinated set of revenue-generating and related activities, processes and systems that enable organizations to plan, execute, monitor and adjust in real time to achieve customer, product and revenue targets. The imperative to maximize outcomes from all channels and departments of revenue faces many challenges in every organization. Key revenue responsibilities across departments that generate new business and client relationships, retain existing ones through potential subscription renewals or upselling, and expand into existing customers are all about setting up revenue efforts in an effective manner. Territories that are balanced, quota and compensation that are aligned with corporate objectives, and reliable forecasts are key to achieving overall goals and outcomes. Sales performance management is a subset of revenue performance management, and this research also assesses what a sales organization needs if they are only focused on a single revenue source.

In addition, new initiatives from technology vendors that use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) that apply to historic data can create new insights to inform both management and revenue-focused professionals. The use of AI can be applied in a variety of different ways, from individual deal scoring to overall pipeline health, customer churn risk prediction and identifying upsell and cross-sell opportunities for existing customers, as well as next-best-action recommendations. All this information can be used to inform revenue forecasts with a greater degree of accuracy and predictability than traditional bottom-up judgement forecasting on its own. And in response to the increased pressure to retain revenue talent, it can be used both to improve individual and teams’ abilities to succeed and to highlight those at risk of leaving.

A well-developed strategy to utilize current and future talent for sales and revenue efforts is essential for the best possible performance.

Ensuring that all buying and selling channels and departments contribute as fully as possible to the success of the organization — to retention, growth, profitability and the overall customer experience — requires not only dedication but effective strategy and planning. A well-developed strategy to utilize current and future talent for sales and revenue efforts is essential for the best possible performance. To carry out this mission, organizations need a set of coordinated revenue-related activities, processes and systems that enable the sales and revenue teams, from leadership and operations to the manager and sellers and customer success, to operate in a coordinated and collaborative manner. The evolution to RPM enables the ability to maximize outcomes across all buying or revenue channels.

Sales and revenue teams are designed to deliver the most effective return on an organization’s products and services across customers or consumers and must ensure that selling is done efficiently and intelligently. Sales and revenue channels and departments are typically complex entities, often with cultures and historical approaches that can inadvertently sabotage their performance. And many in leadership believe that sales teams can adapt and change its behavior without seeking out and using best practices.

In our view, effective management across sales and revenue operations requires well-designed and continuously optimized territories and accounts aligned with quotas that are designed to achieve an organization’s full revenue potential. Territories can be based not only on geographies but on a variety of alternate drivers leading to virtual territories more aligned with current needs. Quotas need to be linked to both overall organization objectives and product and service category targets. With the advent of self-service and digital channels, and as customers can engage across multiple channels for a single purchase, both quotas and territories need to ensure sales individuals are not penalized or disincentivized. This foundation must be established through modeling and planning that will provide the analytics and metrics necessary to guide revenue leadership and operations for the coming month, quarter, year and beyond. To remain flexible and responsive to market conditions, organizations should employ the concept of continuous revenue performance monitoring and adjust territories, quotas and incentives based on data-driven insights and forecasts rather than a whim and gut feeling.

Using spreadsheets to manage revenue operations and performance is ineffective and can be problematic when trying to achieve optimal outcomes.

Use of analytics and data from operations and planning can assist in revenue-related compensation plans that utilize commissions and incentives to influence and align behavior and priorities. To optimize revenue performance, organizations must be able to design and apply incentives that motivate those supporting revenue generation to reach their targets. To evaluate whether compensation plans and incentives are effective, revenue leadership needs tools to help assess the relationship between plans, targets and actual performance. Comparing compensation and incentive plans among all revenue personnel and with other parts of the organization, for example, can help managers determine whether what they provide is appropriate. Goals and objectives must be defined, established, tracked and then linked to incentives and rewards to help guide revenue performance. Moreover, organizations need to know whether their compensation is competitive in their market. Using benchmarks to compare compensation to that of others in the industry can provide this information.

Using spreadsheets to manage revenue operations and performance is ineffective and can be problematic when trying to achieve optimal outcomes. Spreadsheets are not designed for managing the data needed across revenue channels or the varying types of buying and selling channels that must be measured toward goals and targets. Spreadsheets also cannot scale as a company grows. The use of multiple spreadsheets, often stored on users’ local drives, is a factor in producing scattered information, which the majority of organizations cite as a major impediment to managing revenue performance. A dedicated approached to RPM can provide a better method to achieve an organization’s goals.

Even revenue-related applications such as sales force automation (SFA) and customer relationship management (CRM) that are designed to capture data about accounts, contacts and opportunities cannot deliver optimal visibility into overall revenue performance in the way that a dedicated RPM system can. Dashboards and reports from SFA systems typically look only at historical performance, but backward-looking reports can’t provide timely guidance on the current state of quotas and incentives for sales professionals and are not flexible enough to provide information on, or credit, others involved in deals.

Our comprehensive evaluation of vendors takes into consideration all the preceding characteristics needed for a revenue performance approach. Revenue performance management systems should deliver functionality and support that enables organizations to plan for and optimize revenue growth across all their relevant teams and channels. Our Buyers Guide report will be of relevance to those organizations who have decided to adopt a revenue performance approach, or who are investigating it.

This research evaluates the following vendors that offer products that address key elements of revenue performance management as we define it: Anaplan, Board International, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, Varicent Software, Xactly.

Buyers Guide Overview

For over two decades, Ventana Research has conducted market research in a spectrum of areas across business applications, tools and technologies. Ventana Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of vendors and products that is rooted in an understanding of the business requirement in any organization. Utilization of our research methodology and decades of experience enables our Buyers Guide to be an effective method to assess and select technology vendors and products. The findings of this research undertaking contribute to our comprehensive approach to ranking and rating vendors in a manner that is based on the assessments completed by an organization.

This Ventana Research Buyers Guide: Revenue Performance Management is the distillation of over a year of market and product research efforts. It is an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings will address organizations requirements for RPM software. The index is structured to support a request for information (RFI) that could be used in the RFP process by incorporating all criteria needed to evaluate, select, utilize and maintain relationships with technology vendors. An effective product and customer experience with a technology vendor can ensure the best long-term relationship and value achieved from a resource and financial investment.

Ventana Research has designed the Buyers Guide to provide a balanced perspective of vendors and products that is rooted in an understanding of business requirements in any organization.

In this Buyers Guide, Ventana Research evaluates the software in seven key categories that are weighted to reflect buyers’ needs based on our expertise and research. Five are product-experience related: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability, and Usability. In addition, we consider two customer-experience categories: Validation, and Total Cost of Ownership and Return on Investment (TCO/ROI). To assess functionality, one of the components of capability, we applied the Ventana Research Value Index methodology and blueprint, which links the personas and processes for RPM to an organization’s requirements.

The structure of the research reflects our understanding that the effective evaluation of vendors and products involves far more than just examining product features, potential revenue or customers generated from a vendor’s marketing and sales efforts. We believe it is important to take a comprehensive research-based approach, since making the wrong choice of RPM technology can raise the total cost of ownership, lower the return on investment and hamper an organization’s ability to reach its potential performance. In addition, this approach can reduce the project’s development and deployment time, and eliminate the risk of relying on a short list of vendors that does not represent a best fit for your organization.

Ventana Research believes that an objective review of vendors and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of software.

To ensure the accuracy of the information we collected, we asked participating vendors to provide product and company information across the seven product and customer experience categories that, taken together, reflect the concerns of a well-crafted RFI. Ventana Research then validated the information, first independently through our database of product information and extensive web-based research, and then in consultation with the vendors. Most selected vendors also participated in a one-on-one session providing an overview and demonstration, after which we requested they provide additional documentation to support any new input.

Ventana Research believes that an objective review of vendors and products is a critical business strategy for the adoption and implementation of RPM software and applications. An organization’s review should include a thorough analysis of both what is possible and what is relevant. We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating RPM systems and tools and offer this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these vendors and as an evaluation methodology.

How To Use This Buyers Guide

Evaluating Vendors: The Process

We recommend using the Buyers Guide to assess and evaluate new or existing technology vendors for your organization. The market research can be used as an evaluation framework to establish a formal request for information from technology vendors on their products and customer experience and will shorten the cycle time when creating a RFI. The steps listed below provide a process that can facilitate best possible outcomes.

1. Define the business case and goals.
   Define the mission and business case for investment and the expected outcomes from your organizational and technology efforts. 
2. Specify the business needs.
   Defining the business requirements helps identify what specific capabilities are required with respect to people, processes, information and technology.
3. Assess the required roles and responsibilities.
   Identify the individuals required for success at every level of the organization from executives to front line workers and determine the needs of each. 
4. Outline the project’s critical path.
   What needs to be done, in what order and who will do it? This outline should make clear the prior dependencies at each step of the project plan. 
5. Ascertain the technology approach.
   Determine the business and technology approach that most closely aligns to your organization’s requirements. 
6. Establish technology vendor evaluation criteria.
   Utilize the product experience: Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability, and the customer experience in TCO/ROI and Validation. 
7. Evaluate and select the technology properly.
   Weight the categories in the technology evaluation criteria to reflect your organization’s priorities to determine the short list of vendors and products.
8. Establish the business initiative team to start the project.
   Identify who will lead the project and the members of the team needed to plan and execute it with timelines, priorities and resources. 

The Findings

All of the products we evaluated are feature-rich, but not all the capabilities offered by a technology vendor are equally valuable to types of workers or support everything needed to manage products on a continuous basis. Moreover, the existence of too many capabilities may be a negative factor for an organization if it introduces unnecessary complexity. Nonetheless, you may decide that a larger number of features in the product is a plus, especially if some of them match your organization’s established practices or support an initiative that is driving the purchase of new software.

Factors beyond features and functions or vendor assessments may become a deciding factor. For example, an organization may face budget constraints such that the TCO evaluation can tip the balance to one vendor or another. This is where the Value Index methodology and the appropriate category weighting can be applied to determine the best fit of vendors and products to your specific needs.

Overall Scoring of Vendors Across Categories

The research finds Oracle first on the list with Varicent in second place and Anaplan in third. Companies that place in the top three of a category earn the designation of Leader. Oracle has done so in all seven, Anaplan in four, Board International and Varicent in three, Salesforce in two, and Xactly and SAP in one category.

The overall representation of the research below places the rating of the Product Experience and Customer Experience on the x and y axes, respectively, to provide a visual representation and classification of the vendors. Those vendors whose Product Experience have a higher weighted performance to the axis in aggregate of the five product categories place farther to the right, while the performance and weighting for the two Customer Experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. In short, vendors that place closer to the upper-right on this chart performed better than those closer to the lower-left.

The research places vendors into one of four overall categories: Assurance, Exemplary, Merit or Innovative. This representation classifies vendors overall weighted performance.

Exemplary: The categorization and placement of vendors in Exemplary (upper right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product and Customer Experience requirements. The vendors awarded Exemplary are: Oracle, Anaplan and Board International.

Innovative: The categorization and placement of vendors in Innovative (lower right) represent those that performed the best in meeting the overall Product Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of requirements in Customer Experience. The vendor awarded Innovative is Varicent.

Assurance: The categorization and placement of vendors in Assurance (upper left) represent those that achieved the highest levels in the overall Customer Experience requirements but did not achieve the highest levels of Product Experience. The vendor awarded Assurance is Xactly.

Merit: The categorization for vendors in Merit (lower left) represent those that did not exceed the median of performance in Customer or Product Experience or surpass the threshold for the other three categories. The vendors awarded Merit are: Salesforce and SAP.

We warn that close vendor placement proximity should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well suited for use by every organization or for a specific process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle RPM, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences in how they do these functions that can make one vendor’s offering a better fit than another’s for a particular organization’s needs.

We advise organizations to assess and evaluate vendors based on their requirements and use this research as a reference to their own evaluation of a vendor and products.

Product Experience

The process of researching products to address an organization’s needs should be comprehensive. Our Value Index methodology examines Product Experience and how it aligns with an organization’s life cycle of onboarding, configuration, operations, usage and maintenance. Too often, vendors are not evaluated for the entirety of the products; instead, they are evaluated on market execution and vision of the future, which are flawed since they do not represent an organization’s requirements but how the vendor operates. As more vendors orient to a complete product experience, the more robust of an evaluation can be conducted.

The research based on the methodology of expertise identified the weighting of Product Experience to 80% or four-fifths of the total evaluation. Importance was placed on the categories as follows: Usability (20%), Capability (20%), Reliability (15%), Adaptability (15%) and Manageability (10%). This weighting impacted the resulting overall rankings in this research. Oracle, Varicent and Board International were designated Product Experience Leaders as a result of their commitment to RPM technology. Vendor rankings for Anaplan, Salesforce and Xactly were found to meet a broader range of enterprise requirements for revenue performance management. Oracle and Salesforce in particular placed higher in Adaptability, Manageability and Reliability with its focus to govern, connect and process revenue-related information across the traditional enterprise and cloud computing environments. Other vendors such as Anaplan, Board International, Xactly and Varicent have a less comprehensive range of pre-built connections to third party systems.

Many organizations will only evaluate capabilities for those in IT or administration, but the research identified the criticality of Usability (20% weighting) across a broader set of usage personas that should participate in revenue performance management.

Customer Experience

The importance of the relationship between a vendor and its customers is essential to the actual success of the products and technology. The advancement of the Customer Experience and the entirety of the life cycle an organization has with its vendor is critical for ensuring satisfaction in working with that vendor. Technology providers that have Chief Customer Officers area more likely to have greater investments in the customer relationship and focus more on their success. These leaders also need to take responsibility for ensuring the marketing of their commitment is made abundantly clear on website and in the buying process and customer journey. Our Value Index methodology weights Customer Experience at 20%, or one-fifth, as it represents the framework of commitment and value to the vendor-customer relationship. The two evaluation categories are Validation (10%) and TCO/ROI (10%), which are weighted to represent their importance to the overall research.

The vendors that rank the highest overall in the aggregated and weighted Customer Experience categories are Leaders are Oracle, Xactly and Anaplan. The category leaders in Customer Experience provided the highest level of information to communicate their commitment and dedication to customer needs. Vendors such as Board International, Varicent and Salesforce were not Overall Leaders, but have a high level of commitment to Customer Experience.

There were some vendors that have not made Customer Experience a priority and provide little to no information through their website and presentations or for our evaluation. Although many have customer case studies to promote their success, they lacked depth as to what they do to demonstrate their commitment to an organizations’ journey to RPM. This makes it increasingly difficult for organizations to evaluate vendors on the merits of their commitment to customer success. As the commitment to a vendor is a continuous investment, the importance of supporting customer experience in a holistic evaluation should be included and not underestimated.

Appendix: Vendor Inclusion

For inclusion in the Ventana Research Revenue Performance Management Buyers Guide for 2023, a vendor must be in good standing financially and ethically, have at least $10 million in annual or projected revenue directly attributable to software related to this Buyers Guide, sell products and provide support on at least two continents, and have at least 50 customers. The principal source of the revenue must be software-related and there must have been at least one major software release in the last 18 months.

The vendor must provide products that support RPM for revenue processes and at least four of the functional areas that should be part of the vendor products:

• Deal and pipeline management
• Commissions and incentive compensation
• Sales and revenue forecasting
• Quota and territory planning
• Planning and analytics

The research is designed to be independent of the specifics of vendor packaging and pricing. To represent the real-world environment in which businesses operate, we include vendors that offer suites or packages of products that may include relevant individual modules or applications. If a vendor is actively marketing, selling and developing a product for the general market and is reflected on its website that it is within the scope of the research, that vendor is automatically evaluated for inclusion. 

All vendors that offer relevant RPM products and meet the inclusion requirements were invited to participate in the research evaluation process at no cost to them.

5 of the 7 vendors responded positively to our requests for additional information and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their subscription management products. We categorize participation as follows:

Complete participation: The following vendors actively participated and provided completed questionnaires and demonstrations to help in our evaluation of their product: Anaplan, Board International, Oracle, Varicent and Xactly.

Partial participation: The following vendors provided limited information to help in our evaluation: Salesforce.

No participation: The following vendors provided no information or did not respond to our request: SAP.

Vendors that meet our inclusion criteria but did not completely participate in our Buyers Guide were assessed solely on publicly available information. As this could have significant impact on their classification and rating, we recommend additional scrutiny when evaluating those vendors.

Products Evaluated

Vendors of Note

We did not include vendors that, as a result of our research and analysis, did not satisfy the criteria for inclusion in the Buyers Guide. These are listed below as “Vendors of Note.”