Boards and investors are challenging the C-suite to transform their revenue operations into intelligent revenue engines. Learn how transforming your revenue process with an intelligent revenue platform can be your organization's key to success.
Boards and investors are challenging the C-suite to transform their revenue operations into intelligent revenue engines. And rightly so. According to Accenture, 93 percent of organizations believe their existing revenue operating models cannot adapt to changing market conditions. McKinsey found that 85 percent of organizations have been unable to grow both revenue and profit over an extended period of time. And 94 percent of revenue leaders are not confident that they will meet, let alone exceed, their revenue goals, according to Gartner.
So in other words, most businesses fear they don’t have the right people, processes and/or technology in place to operate at speed. And we know that the ability to move fast is often the difference between success and failure.
Guide
Apr 06, 2021
The State of Global Enterprise Sales Performance 2021
Driving Revenue in Every Situation is Key
Revenue growth is the flywheel that powers all other parts of the business. However, revenue growth is nearly impossible to sustain if you aren’t focused on Intelligent Revenue. So what is Intelligent Revenue and why does it matter? It matters because not all revenue is the same.
Best-in-class organizations identify intelligent revenue by examining the quality of its characteristics, which include:
- Predictability - understanding what is likely to happen based on historic data and current trends
- Profitability - uncovering what changes need to be made to optimize revenue plans
- Resiliency - the ability to adapt plans with agility in response to unforeseen disruptions
The fastest way to transform your revenue process is to understand what’s stopping your organization from achieving its highest and most consistent performance.
1. You can’t get predictability without data.
However, according to the Xactly State of Global Sales Performance 2021 study, at least one in four revenue leaders rely solely on their intuition, rather than data-driven intelligence, to make the strategic decisions that drive favorable revenue outcomes. That’s dangerous because of intuition bias - the phenomenon of thinking you know something without being able to explain why you know it. As forecasting precision becomes increasingly important, data is exposing the hazards of intuition as a decision-making tool. Gartner states that by 2025, 60 percent of sales organizations will move away from intuition bias to a more data-driven approach.
2. It’s nearly impossible to achieve profitability without incentives that align with your business goals and drive behavioral change.
There is an unnecessary reluctance to optimize revenue processes, as leaders cite that doing things the way “they have always been done,” and in today’s business landscape, maintaining the status quo is sadly the most common approach to revenue management today.
3. The ability to move fast can be the difference between success and failure.
Most planning solutions today do not offer the ability to quickly and effectively make changes. One-half of all CEOs and CIOs polled agree that rapid decision-making and execution are not only important but essential to a company’s competitive standing. In fact, nearly 90 percent of executives surveyed by the Economist Intelligence Unit believe that organizational agility is critical for business success.
The Key to Success is Intelligent Revenue
To overcome these challenges, you need a platform that harnesses revenue data automatically, instantly, and with the advantage of AI to make data-informed decisions. That’s what Xactly delivers in its Intelligent Revenue Platform, the enterprise-ready way to go from uncertain revenue to Intelligent Revenue.
Xactly’s Intelligent Revenue Platform combines the characteristics of Intelligent Revenue to power growth with:
- Revenue Intelligence to create predictable forecasts by combining multiple data sources such as Salesforce, Oracle, and Gainsight, in addition to Xactly’s 16 years of customer data, to dramatically improve revenue results.
- Revenue Performance to generate profitable revenue with incentives that drive behavioral change at scale.
- Revenue Optimization to achieve resilient revenue, providing the agility and speed needed to make adjustments to sales plans, quotas and territories, and incentives
By leveraging Xactly’s new Intelligent Revenue Platform, enterprises can unify front office (client-facing revenue generators) and back office (non-client-facing revenue) functions, with a holistic view of data across the entire revenue lifecycle, from expense to commission exposure.
Xactly is uniquely positioned to provide the years of data and level of compensation knowledge to be able to deliver this kind of solution. The Xactly Intelligent Revenue Platform provides the AI needed to make decisions that are precise and continue to improve the quality of those choices over time with numerous machine learning methods. Intuition is enhanced with additional insights to assure greater accuracy and precision.
When these characteristics are combined, they allow revenue organizations to operate in a truly sustainable way, allowing them to grow and generate the best revenue possible in any situation. To learn more, check out the recent discussion with our Founder and CEO Chris Cabrera and CRO Jamie Anderson about how Xactly is empowering companies with data-driven Intelligent Revenue.
