Report
Nov 29, 2022
Companies today need new levels of revenue insight that allow them to both be agile in the present and prepare for the future in real time. Revenue intelligence is the key to unlocking this capability.
In short, revenue intelligence provides end-to-end, high-level insight into every stage of your revenue lifecycle. It encompasses all potential revenue streams and analyzes both internal and external factors that could impact your growth potential.
Even for companies that have already adopted a RevOps mindset and strategy, revenue intelligence is a step up to more sophisticated analysis. Companies with true revenue intelligence capabilities are smarter, more agile, more informed, and more data-driven than their competitors.
Quick Takeaways
- Revenue intelligence analyzes data across the entire revenue lifecycle.
- Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of businesses will be using AI-powered tools to drive smarter sales and revenue.
- RevOps is the foundation of revenue intelligence, putting the frameworks and processes in place needed to collect and analyze revenue data.
- Benefits of revenue intelligence include predictable revenue, total visibility, adaptive forecasting capabilities, and a shortened sales cycle.
- Good revenue intelligence platforms will offer features like easy integration with current systems, language data analysis, pipeline insights, automation, and customization.
Revenue Intelligence: What it is and Why it Matters
Revenue intelligence is the process of centralizing and analyzing data across the entire revenue lifecycle. It captures insights from every customer-facing team — including marketing, sales, and customer support — to create a holistic understanding of current revenue streams and revenue growth potential.
In markets so fast-changing and impacted by so many unpredictable factors, finance teams need the whole revenue story in order to make the right decisions. They need real-time data to inform them and accurate insight into what may happen in the future. Revenue intelligence is what provides it. It’s also the emerging strategy of the future — Gartner predicts that by 2025, 75% of all organizations will replace traditional sales playbooks with AI-powered data solutions that drive smarter sales.
The Relationship Between Revenue Intelligence and RevOps
Revenue operations (RevOps) — a holistic, data-driven, and collaborative approach to revenue growth — sets the stage for revenue intelligence. After all, without the right organizational structures and strategies in place, it’s impossible to curate and analyze data in a centralized way.
In other words, implementing RevOps is a key step toward achieving true revenue intelligence. RevOps streamlines workflows, aligns teams, and puts the technology in place to better understand revenue. Revenue intelligence then takes that data and analyzes it in ways that are actionable and can be harnessed toward higher performance.
Forrester has even recently covered technology aimed at combining RevOps and revenue intelligence — called RO&I — that analyzes data across the buyer journey to optimize revenue activities at every stage.
Key Business Benefits of Revenue Intelligence
Predictable revenue
RevOps puts predictable revenue in place by setting the necessary framework to drive YOY growth. Revenue intelligence takes this capability a step further by analyzing every internal and external factor that may impact revenue growth, and creating adaptive forecasts based on multiple scenarios to inform your finance team.
Total visibility
Revenue intelligence aims for total end-to-end visibility across your entire revenue lifecycle. It automatically captures interactions from your CRM (and other systems) and centralizes them into an integrated view.
This level of visibility creates more informed teams across your organization, drives a single source of truth for consistent forecasting and reporting, and gives employees direct insight into every stage of the sales process.
Adaptive forecasting
It’s nearly imperative that companies have adaptive forecasting capabilities in unpredictable markets like those we’ve been operating under in recent years. Adaptive sales forecasting requires AI-powered technology — like that used by revenue intelligence platforms — to account for multiple scenarios and conduct variable analyses that give you insight into your company’s most likely revenue scenarios.
Shortened sales cycle
Intelligent, real-time insights around revenue mean a better ability to act with agility, making process adjustments as needed to refine your sales process and shorten your sales cycle. A shortened sales cycle, of course, enables companies to move more leads through the pipeline, make a higher volume of sales, and ultimately earn more revenue.
Much of this happens through automation, which makes data analytics more seamless, scalable, and accurate (as compared to manual processes or simpler technology solutions).
Guide
Apr 19, 2022
The Road to RevOps
Choosing the Right Revenue Intelligence Platform
Choosing the right revenue platform is essential to revenue intelligence success. But how do you know which solution is right for you? There are some must-have capabilities you want to be sure to look for in potential revenue intelligence solutions.
First, you want your platform to have high integration abilities with your CRM (and any other tools you use to manage sales and revenue). Look at the types of insights each platform can analyze — pipeline insights, forecasting, and sales performance are three critical ones to look for. Automatic data updates and real-time insights are essential.
Language data processors are a common feature of top revenue intelligence platforms, which means they have the ability to record, transcribe, and even analyze conversations with potential customers. They often include natural language processing (NLP) technologies and the ability to analyze sentiment behind language.
Last but not least, the ability to guide sales reps and other employees with personalized dashboards, real-time alerts, and customized reporting are important to your ability to scale your strategy.
Over to You
Ready to upgrade your revenue strategy with revenue intelligence? Xactly’s software solutions can help you revolutionize your revenue strategy while naturally integrating with the systems and technologies you already have in place.
Learn more about Xactly’s suite of solutions or schedule your demo today!
