New in February 2022, Salesforce’s Revenue Intelligence product allows businesses to manage revenue across the customer lifecycle by providing actionable insights that can help ensure organizations are reaching their growth goals. Let’s go into the use cases and benefits, talk about the relationship between revops and revenue intelligence, and look at a real customer success story.
Revenue Intelligence is like a Fitbit for the enterprise
That’s how I see it. Not only does Revenue Intelligence help you identify the success patterns to grow more revenue, but it also provides consistent coaching to help you stay on the path toward what I like to call “revenue wellness.” Revenue wellness means that revenue is coming from customers that you actually want to be doing business with. It also means that revenue is predictable and, in many cases, recurring. If a healthy business is one in which revenue is growing, then Salesforce’s Revenue Intelligence is the equivalent of a Fitbit, making sure you “get your steps in.”
The Benefits of Revenue Intelligence
Where should I focus my efforts? Which deals need my attention? Which deals are potentially missing key success markers? As a business and as a salesperson, Revenue Intelligence helps me understand where I should allocate resources to drive revenue and close business.
Revenue Intelligence will help companies identify the patterns in their business that can drive revenue and help amplify those success patterns across a broad team. This goes way beyond a statistician working in isolation. This is about driving changes in behavior across an organization to grow revenue and close more business.
It also provides a level of predictability in your business. We’ve been operating in one of the most disruptive, volatile times the business world has ever seen. And businesses are generally hungry for a return to predictability. Predictable, high-quality revenue drives the valuation for most businesses. Being able to confidently call a number and minimize surprises is critical.
Revops has been a hot topic… Here’s how it relates to Revenue Intelligence
Revops is a broad functional process that looks to connect sales, marketing, and service efforts to help companies efficiently acquire new customers and retain and grow the customers they already have. And what’s really been interesting to see is the acceleration of revops as a concept in many companies over the last year and a half. You see this if you visit LinkedIn and simply search for revops job titles — a 300% increase in revops titles in the past 18 months on LinkedIn alone. Not only are these teams growing, but companies who are deploying revops teams perform better and they grow faster.
But there certainly are some challenges. One of the top concerns we consistently see for revops teams is data accessibility and quality. Today, many companies are seeking to leverage data to identify and acquire high-quality revenue streams that are predictable and recurring. That’s their goal… And to do that well, you have to make your systems more intelligent. And that’s where Salesforce’s Revenue Intelligence comes in.
The days of just following your gut are over
It really comes down to three capabilities:
1. Pattern recognition
This one is simple: pattern recognition means using AI and analytics to find patterns in your business that influence revenue and growth. We have the means now, and don’t have to guess what’s next. We can look at historic data to inform our next steps and tactical approach.
2. Coaching
Once we know those patterns, we can ensure our broader team is properly coached on how those patterns impact their specific customers and deals. That coaching will come in the form of system-driven recommended actions. For example, maybe we are recommending to our frontline sales rep that they bring in an “executive sponsor” to move their deal to the next stage.
Coaching derived from analytics and AI models needs to be served in the regular workflow of end users so that we can transition from insight to action. We refer to that as the “last mile.” And frankly, that is the step in the process that can make or break your Revenue Intelligence efforts. If insights are not being consumed in the workflow, right where users work, your organization will struggle to nail down ROI for your efforts and likely won’t hit your business goals.
3. Activity tracking
The last capability that helps us move beyond basic intuition and “following our gut” would be activity tracking. Once we know the patterns and push those insights into the workflow of a user, it’s important to understand who is consuming those recommendations and assess the impact those insights are having on our desired business outcomes.
Nobody knows Revenue Intelligence on the Salesforce platform like us
As a longtime Salesforce partner with a vested interest in scalable, predictable revenue growth for our customers, the Atrium team has been doing Revenue Intelligence on the Salesforce platform before it was called Revenue Intelligence. For the last several years, we have been helping businesses on the Salesforce platform with customer acquisition and predictive forecasting needs across a diverse set of industries.
One great example is our customer Twilio
It’s one thing to create revenue. It’s another thing to find revenue that’s already sitting there in your system, at risk of being lost. Within just two hours of use, Twilio AEs discovered over $250,000 in missed opportunities thanks to a solution our team built. There’s much more to the story, and their success shows the importance of Revenue Intelligence capabilities to drive revenue growth.
Interested in finding out whether Revenue Intelligence is right for you? Contact us to set up a quick assessment call.
