Читать книгу Revenue Operations - Stephen Diorio, Chris K. Hummel - Страница 22

Several factors have changed how we generate revenue growth in the past 30 years. Customer expectations have shifted as buyers have become more digital, better informed, and impatient. Traditional selling processes have been disrupted to become more capital intensive as more buying activity happens within the digital channel infrastructure and as sales personnel rely on analytics and automation to deliver against customers' demands. These challenges are being amplified by the growing appetite of owners, investors, and CEOs to replace episodic sales transactions and fragmented teams with reliable recurring revenues and aligned organizations (see Figure 1.5).

Here are some of the forces and megatrends that have changed the basis for generating revenue growth over the past 30 years:

 Changing buyer behavior has elevated the customer experience and made it the primary goal. Business-to-business buying behavior has passed the tipping point where “new school” digital buying behavior becomes pervasive and forces organizations to adapt traditional selling models to meet customer expectations for faster cadence, complete answers, digital channel engagement, and relevant content. It's well known that digitally enabled customers armed with better information are pushing sellers to deliver a superior customer experience in the “moments that matter” across the entire revenue cycle. As buyers become more digital and demanding, those moments will ultimately become the only way to differentiate your business. Customers want more relevant information and complete answers faster. Recent research shows most buyers don't even want to talk to humans if they don't have to.FIGURE 1.5 The Megatrends That Changed the Growth FormulaFor decades, research and collaboration, and increasingly transactions have migrated to digital channels. Over 80% of customers now prefer to communicate via text, mobile, and online chat in service interactions according to the Salesforce.com “State of Service” report.²¹ These changes in buyer behavior were accelerated by the impact that the recent pandemic had on customer engagement – which doubled the percentage of sales that occur in digital channels, according to research by the Duke Fuqua School of Business.⁴Changing buyer demographics are also playing a big role in this change. About 10,000 baby boomers turn 65 every day, according to Forbes.³⁹ Millennial buyers, on the other hand, were raised on Google search and digital channels and expect to do all or most of their buying 100% online; 83% of millennial B2B buyers expect e-commerce to keep them more informed about product choices than ever before.⁴⁰ Most (55%) of millennial B2B customers today would prefer to buy a complex solution without engaging a sales rep at all, according to Gartner.¹⁷And when they do ask questions, they want fast and complete answers. “Today, half of the working population was born after 1977,” says Jaime Punishill, CMO of Lionbridge. “That's important because the only information paradigm they've known is defined by Google – which is fundamentally an ask-response paradigm. They don't want to sort through big menus or wait for answers. They simply want to ask the question using Google, or voice search, or a human if need be.”³³ This is forcing sellers to fundamentally shift the way content and websites are organized from a manual classification scheme to more data-driven response management paradigms based on how buyers search and ask questions. To adapt, sales enablement teams are shifting to a response management paradigm that uses AI to track and anticipate the questions customers ask and make it faster to provide a contextual answer by a sales rep, service rep, chatbot, or a voice-activated device.But if the experience is bad, it can be fatal. Almost 60% would stop doing business with a B2B vendor based solely on a mobile experience that's difficult to use.⁴⁰ This has elevated the customer experience to the primary goal in selling. This primacy of the customer experience puts pressure on managers to better manage the end-to-end commercial process rather than a few parts or stages of it. Managers struggle to coordinate revenue teams, management systems, metrics, and platforms into a more unified customer experience. It puts a premium on systems and procedures and processes that improve speed and agility, as well as personalize customer experience and connect channels.

 The speed and cadence of business is faster. The cadence of customer communications has accelerated as conversations have moved from face-to-face to digital channels. There is less time to rest and regroup between calls. Sales velocity has become so fast that revenue teams and the executives who direct them require real-time customer intelligence and selling guidance. The managers and operations professionals we surveyed rated visibility of customers, seller effectiveness, account health, and pipeline health as the four top drivers of the performance of “4D” (distributed, diverse, digital, and dynamic) revenue teams.

 Selling has become more capital intensive. The executives we spoke to told us the key to leading a revenue team in the twenty-first century is more about managing selling systems and less about managing salespeople. As selling has become more digital, it has also become more capital intensive. The capital and operating components of the growth investment mix have both changed significantly in the past 30 years. For example, the commercial technology portfolio – or the sales and marketing technology stack – has grown to represent a large component of growth investment mix and sales and marketing operations overhead. Worldwide spending on customer experience (CX) and relationship management (CRM) software grew 15.6% last year as 81% of marketers say they will compete completely on the basis of CX, according to Gartner.¹⁶ The Duke CMO Survey reports marketers are now investing more money in Customer Relationship Management than they are in Branding.⁴ In all, the average enterprise now has invested in over 20 selling tools.³⁶ Smaller cloud-based businesses use over 30 on average to support selling.²⁶For the first time, as mass media declines in reach and privacy concerns make third-party media more untenable, at most firms more of the operating budget is being spent on “owned” digital channel infrastructure than on “paid” media (digital or otherwise).¹⁶¹ As a by-product, businesses are investing over 10% of their marketing budgets on advanced analytics to find ways to monetize the valuable customer engagement, seller activity, and product telemetry data this digital selling infrastructure creates. These commercial systems need to be managed more like capital equipment than discretionary expenses if they are going to generate real revenue yields. All of this puts pressure on managers to rationalize, streamline, connect, and monetize the growth technology portfolio to generate greater financial returns from these assets and to better enable scalable and predictable growth. “Connecting the dots” across the increasingly complex and expensive technology ecosystems that support revenue has become a basis for competitive advantage.

 Selling is more data driven. A revolution in advanced sales analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – fueled by rich new customer engagement, seller activity data, product usage data sources, and increased investment in analytics – is changing the way companies grow and create value. Advances in AI and a growing portfolio of AI-enabled selling tools are making data-driven selling possible. The benefits of this are faster information flow, better allocation of selling resources, and more visibility into pipeline, account, and opportunity potential. Advanced analytics are helping managers improve the performance of every aspect of the go-to-market system. Such tools will be the primary drivers of growth, competitive advantage, and value creation in the next 25 years. These changes amount to a Copernican revolution in selling, where every action and activity is centered around customer data.

 The pivot to 4D selling has changed the economics and the architecture of selling. The massive and continued shift to remote work, hybrid work, and work-from-anywhere practices by both buyers and sellers has made digital, data-driven, dynamic, and dispersed selling teams a primary channel to market. This has changed the economics of field sales by shifting dollars from travel and real estate to more scalable training and technology investments. It has also significantly altered long-standing assumptions about sales force emphasis, roles, workloads, selling costs, and the mix, nature, and cadence of engagement needed to convert prospects into customers. This has every organization rethinking geographic-based territory definitions, quota assignments based on face-to-face calling patterns, and labor-intensive coverage models. Readjusting the “architecture” of your commercial model to reflect these new dynamics can reduce selling costs and improve seller performance significantly with no additional investment.

 Managing customer lifetime value has become a primary focus as businesses chase recurring revenues. A business with recurring revenues is worth more than one that must sell their offerings to their customers one at a time repeatedly. So it's no surprise that most boards (53%) are pushing their CEOs to repackage their products and services as subscription pricing models, usage-based models, or cloud-based offerings, according to a report by CFO Magazine.⁵⁰ Almost every business (90%) that sells “on-premises” technology, equipment, or software is moving to a cloud model, according to Gartner.¹⁷ Any business that can pull it off – including industrial firms like Honeywell, automotive firms like Audi, and infrastructure like Flexential – is trying to move to recurring revenues. Moving from selling products to selling subscriptions and SaaS solutions requires significant changes to the way you “go to market.” It shifts the focus of selling from hunting for new customers to building more loyal customers and expanding relationships with them. It has increased the importance of growing customer equity and lifetime value as a driver of firm value. It has also forced organizations that engage customers – sales, marketing, customer experience, and support services – to find ways to work together collectively as one revenue team.

 Growth has become a team sport. There are 18 strategic levers that grow revenues, profits, and firm value, according to academic research compiled by the Marketing Accountability Standards Board.⁷ These growth levers reside in different parts of your organization. They include the ability of IT to move information quickly, the ability of service teams to build customer equity, and the ability to deliver a superior digital channel experience. They also include the effectiveness of sales and marketing channels, the engagement of customer-facing employees, and the perceptions of innovation that your product team creates in the marketplace. No single organization or leader controls all 18 of these growth levers. Our analysis shows they are distributed across sales, marketing, customers success, product management, and sometimes information technology. When we add it up, none of these traditional job functions controlled more than a quarter of the levers of growth. And critical new pieces of the growth equation – such as customer analytics and managing digital channels – are being fought over by these executives. As a result, teamwork across functions has become fundamental to managing revenue growth. This is forcing managers to develop operating models, incentives, and platforms that help get marketing, sales, and service silos working as one revenue team with a single common purpose.

 A growing focus on financial accountability has made it more difficult to fund smart growth investments. Growth leaders – CMOs, CROs, and Chief Commercial Officers – are under growing pressure to prove the contribution of growth investments and assets to financial performance. This is a good thing. You can't manage what you cannot measure. Demanding to know the financial contribution of every growth action and investment to the business is essential to generating profitable growth. This focus on increased financial accountability is fundamentally changing how commercial resources and assets are allocated, organized, funded, measured, and deployed. But there's a problem. The way most organizations measure and calculate the performance of their growth investments is flawed. Simple revenue attribution measures favor short-term actions. Smart investments that connect sales to marketing and span budgets are hard to justify. Valuable capital investments like building the type of digital selling infrastructure that has made Amazon preferred by most shoppers don't fit into operating budgets. They also take too long to pay off for impatient CFOs. This has created unintended consequences that actually do more harm than good. For example, a bad short-term investment with clear attribution will take precedence over a profitable long-term investment that requires many different organizations to work together. This flawed approach to financial accountability has made it next to impossible for managers to create a business case for investments that can create scalable growth, such as one-to-one personalization, real-time coaching, response management, and account-based marketing.