Ventana Research recently announced its 2024 research agenda for the Office of Revenue, continuing the guidance we have offered for nearly two decades to help enterprises across industries derive optimal value and improved outcomes from business technology. Chief Sales and Revenue Officers face an imperative to manage their sales and revenue organizations, but they do not always have the guidance they need to embrace technology. As we look forward to 2024, we are focusing on the entire selling and buying journey, how changing buyer behavior is exacerbating challenges in achieving targets and whether recent developments in Generative AI can help. We are looking at applications that simplify processes and tasks across the customer buying experience from beginning to end.
Our research agenda is crafted using our firm’s expertise on business requirements and our knowledge of software providers and products. Through our continuous market research, we
In 2024, we will continue our focus on the broader concept of revenue management to help enterprises address their strategy, planning and operations. The rise of digital commerce and subscription business models has shifted enterprises’ primary focus on new business. With the higher cost of new customer acquisition and the resulting importance of customer retention and expansion, the entire customer experience is of vital importance in building and sustaining a business. These processes that support the customer experience require specific technology—a 360-degree view of customers, digital buying technology, pricing optimization for managing B2C and B2B models, configure-price-quote (CPQ) and contract lifecycle management (CLM) applications to enable adjusting contract terms based on the configuration of products as is most often found in B2B-focused enterprises. We also will focus on the mixed-revenue model that includes the subscription management experience as, for many industries, this is a growing part of the overall customer journey.
Improving sales outcomes and revenue are key to sales effectiveness, and emerging sales applications and tools provide the path to that goal. New applications and tools geared toward salespeople and processes are designed to help not just with managing sales teams but also to help salespeople effectively sell. The launch of competing GenAI offerings in 2023 allowed many software providers to incorporate these new technologies in applications. Our research in 2024 will focus on how all aspects of AI, not just GenAI, can be applied to address specific use cases in managing revenue. We will conduct market research and publish a Buyer’s Guide in CRM covering the departmental and process perspective of software providers and products. Reflecting this, our sales and revenue practice addresses six focus areas: Digital Commerce, Revenue Management, Sales Engagement, Sales and Revenue Performance Management, Subscription Management and Partner Management.
Digital commerce enables enterprises to engage with any type of customer across digital channels—the web, mobile apps, text, voice-activated “agents,” video and social channels—to
Moving beyond consumer purchase, we will also look at how B2B selling and buying are increasingly using B2C digital approaches to mirror this experience. We will conduct Buyers Guide research in 2024 to identify best practices and assess and rate software providers’ potential to help meet evolving commerce needs.
With the rise of digital commerce and the subscription and usage business models, enterprises are increasingly recognizing that the traditional primacy of a new customer-focus
Despite this, through 2026, fewer than 3 in 10 enterprises will replace disparate marketing, sales and customer operations teams with a unified revenue operations approach, thus lowering their revenue growth. We will conduct new Buyer’s Guide research in 2024 to identify best practices and assess and rate software providers’ potential to help meet emerging revenue management needs across all aspects of the buyer and customer journey. We will also focus on the importance of evaluating CRM implementations and whether they are keeping up with business process changes, as so much of software providers’ feature development is dependent on the quality and timeliness of the underlying data to drive insights and AI recommendations.
Sales engagement facilitates intelligent engagement and execution by sales professionals to achieve optimal revenue outcomes. With a recognized decline in quota attainment, a shift in
We do not believe sales enablement should exist as a separate category as much of the need and recent technical innovations link enablement to engagement; and, like engagement, it is increasingly utilizing much of the same data as sales engagement applications to drive effectiveness within selling teams. Enterprises should invest in sales engagement capabilities designed to support salespersons and not just those that manage sales teams. In 2024, we will examine the need for sales engagement applications as separate applications from CRM Systems as well as conduct Buyer’s Guide research on sales engagement software providers and into the proposal to contract process in CPQ and CLM.
Sales and Revenue Performance Management
Revenue performance management (RPM) is the natural successor to sales performance management (SPM) and enables revenue and sales leaders to align strategy and planning to
Despite this importance, by 2027, only slightly more than 1 in 5 enterprises will deploy dedicated sales and revenue performance management in response to the changing business economics of subscription models and omnichannel selling to consistently achieve revenue targets.
Organizational and ownership issues of the processes needed for effective RPM are often impediments to a more effective balance between planning and execution. We recommend that enterprises that are planning to adopt RPM use our most recent Revenue Performance Management Buyers Guide to identify appropriate software providers and products and to also examine sales compensation and sales performance management software providers.
Subscription management involves processes and applications designed to manage the subscriber experience from first digital touch to subscriber engagement and billing. To
In fact, by 2027, over one-half of all enterprises will deploy a mixed revenue model that includes subscriptions and usage pricing in addition to one-time sales as enterprises make adjustments to remain competitive. For B2B companies, a usage-based business model may make more sense, imposing new requirements on software providers to enable pricing models that support individually negotiated contracts. Our 2023 Subscription Management Buyers Guide that reviews best practices and assesses and rates software providers’ potential to help meet emerging subscription needs is required reading for enterprises investigating offerings in this area. We will be publishing an updated guide in 2024.
Partner management involves processes and applications designed to support businesses that bundle or resell other providers’ services and products. Although not new, this is a
Every sales organization, no matter how many employees it has or the size of its revenue, has an opportunity to significantly improve the selling experience. Enhancements to underlying processes and technology can have an immediate impact on top- and bottom-line results. Determining your path forward in 2024 requires an effective strategy and knowledge of the technology you need to improve or add to your existing portfolio of investments.
Subscribe to our community to keep up to date on our research efforts in 2024 and navigate to our revenue expertise and topic areas to see the detailed agenda and continuously updated 90-day calendar as well as more research facts and best practices.
Regards,
Stephen Hurrell