Managing Revenue Instead of Sales
Organizations are increasingly realizing a singular focus on traditional sales execution is not enough to ensure growth. Shifts to subscription models and the advent of omni-channel selling mean that the old way of managing sales is transforming into managing revenue, whether the channel is direct, indirect, or e-commerce, and whether it comes from new or existing customers. The buying experience itself is a key part of the overall customer experience, critical in ensuring customer retention and leading to opportunities for expansion. While much attention has been put on using technology as an asset in the early stages of customer interaction, less attention has been paid to downstream activities such as the configure, price and quote (CPQ) and contract life cycle management (CLM) experience. This is unfortunate since friction during these stages can potentially disrupt a sale as much as a bad call or product demonstration can. A smooth, automated quoting and contract process is key to building a constructive buyer-seller relationship.
Organizations often have mature automated processes for top-of-funnel sales activities with the ability to derive targeted insights into process performance and efficiency. Many of these sales stages are focused on prospecting, discovery, qualification and conversion of interest to active sales negotiation. But problems still arise in the quoting and contracting phase of the sales cycle. These steps often involve other teams, such as finance and legal, and include processes that are typically not yet automated. This leads to a risk of errors and delays at an equally important part of the revenue life cycle management. To ensure a smooth buying process and compliance with cross-team organizational policies, this process should be digitized and automated as much as possible to avoid errors, delays and potential re-work. If a smooth and frictionless process is not achieved, it can result in lost customers and collapsed sales.