Guide
Jun 16, 2021
Intelligent Revenue gives you a deeper view into how your organization generates revenue. Learn how it helps you improve forecasting accuracy, increase profitability, and gain agility and resilience.
Revenue growth is the flywheel that powers the rest of your business. Over the past year, it became even more clear that it’s the difference between success and failure. As a result, mindsets around growth are changing.
It’s no longer sustainable to operate with a “win-at-all-costs” approach. You can no longer rely on creating growth without considering the cost of achieving it. This has caused leaders to rethink how they approach revenue and focus on driving Intelligent Revenue.
What is Intelligent Revenue?
Intelligent Revenue gives you a deeper view into how your organization generates revenue, the resources it takes, and if your incentive compensation is driving the right sales behaviors and motivating reps to bring in the strongest deals.
Here’s how Xactly Chief Revenue Officer Jamie Anderson describes it:
The move to Intelligent Revenue was on the horizon before the pandemic, but the past year made it a necessity. Leaders have realized that not all revenue is created equally, nor is it all beneficial for your company.
You need to drive revenue and growth strategically, meaning you must be able to identify good and bad revenue and build your go-to-market strategies around the good. Then you can map territories that put reps in touch with the right target accounts and design incentives that motivate them to bring that good revenue home.
When you’re able to do that effectively, it’s called Intelligent Revenue.
The Characteristics of Intelligent Revenue
The secret ingredient to Intelligent Revenue is data. You need to be able to look at past performance, compare it to current trends, and combine it with third-party data. Together, this will give you the most information to better understand how you can generate revenue.
When you add in AI-enable Intelligent Revenue technology, you can examine this data more easily and gain insight into three areas:
- Revenue Intelligence: Combine multiple data sources to create predictable forecasts
- Revenue Performance: Create incentives that motivate sellers and generate profitable revenue
- Revenue Optimization: Quickly identify necessary changes and make plan changes with agility
Achieving revenue intelligence, performance, and optimization means you’re able to identify the actions you need to take to drive Intelligent Revenue. This gives you more visibility and control over how you generate revenue by allowing you to examine three revenue characteristics:
- Predictability: Understanding what is likely to happen based on historical data and current trends
- Profitability: Uncovering the necessary changes or adjustments to drive the most “good” revenue
- Resiliency: Adapting plans with agility in response to changing business conditions
Together, this data allows you to create a plan of action more quickly and make adjustments in between larger planning sessions should selling conditions shift.
Guide
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10 Steps to Accurate, Data-Driven Sales Forecasting
Unleashing the Power of Intelligent Revenue
Many organizations are beginning to shift to Intelligent Revenue, but there still remains a hesitancy to change. 53 percent of companies continue to rely on intuition and “doing things the way they’ve always been done,” especially when it comes to critical business decisions, according to the 2021 Xactly State of Global Enterprise Sales Survey.
The problem with this approach is that it’s in our human nature to fall back on our experience, but that leaves room for error. You don’t want to throw out your intuition entirely. Your experience is valuable; you need to back it up with factual data.
That’s precisely what Intelligent Revenue does: it combines the power of your intuition and expertise with data-backed intelligence.
Combining your expertise with AI-driven technology creates a holistic view of your business. This gives you more control over how you bring in revenue and the processes, incentives, quotas, and territories that get you there. That way, you’re always on the right path to achieve your targets no matter the selling circumstances.
To learn more about Intelligent Revenue and how you can get started, download the guide, “6 Strategies to Building an Accurate Sales & Revenue Forecast.”
