CSM is unable to deliver as SE Over/Under sold to Customer

Most of us in business operations see this as a day in life and worse we accept it as part of business eco system especially in the SaaS and pure Services organization where Scope of Work can be fluid and the sales/marketing team often has some liberties allowed in customer acquisition. At the same time, the challenges that puts on the Delivery Team are also equally important as their performance directly affects the customer retention, corporate reputation and also the revenue for the organization.

This challenge requires very close collaboration among multiple team members involved as well as customer expectations. If this is not handled in a very process driven, meticulous and innovative manner, the results can be catastrophic with customer churn within 90 days thereby costing the organization financially as well as reputation.

As RevGain integrates all the phases of a customer lifecycle and then looks for the customer sentiment signals, it can detect such conflicts very quickly and help align the various teams to deliver a smooth and timely solution to the customer. This is achieved by collating the data from various systems involved in the process as well unstructured data from various communication channels, meetings, and signals that are further analyzed through RevGain algorithms to provide the Next Best Actions for the CSM and the SE to win the customer confidence instead of being at conflict with each other. These NBAs will also help with upsell and cross-sell with the customer further adding to the revenue generation pipeline.

Product Market Fit

SaaS and pure play Service Organizations commonly have their sales team face challenges with market expectations in contrast with an organization’s published products and services. The utopia of having a perfect customer requirement alignment with the offered product or services portfolio is almost a myth. In this practical world, sales team needs to be creative in helping the customer take the journey with the organization even if the product or services being offered is not 100% aligned.

On the contrary it is common for RevOps leaders to hear this as an excuse when it comes to delivering the targets that are assigned to the field teams. As operations grow beyond eye sight management levels, these issues cannot be easily handled by diving deep into each transaction a field agent level and customer level. This often results in questionable decisions such as penalizing the field personnel for wrong reasons or building a product/service that is not in-line with long term objectives of the organization or losing customers/revenue and/or a combination of all of these impacts.

By simply having RevGain analyze the data that is available in the organization and mapping it with industry expectations that are publicly available through their correlation context engine, such issues can be identified and correct Next Best Actions can eb provided to the team such as giving a product/feature/service enhancement recommendation to the Engineering team or helping the SE understand how a particular solution can be accommodated to suit the most pressing need of the customer whose decision is dependent on meeting that requirement.

Furthermore, a continuous scorecard can also be provided to senior management on the product market fit with detailed data analytics at a feature level as well as at regional market level or by industry.

Deviation in Contracted ARR Vs Actual ARR (Revenue Leakage)

Revenue Leakage is a hot topic in any organization that very quickly gets the attention of the C-Suite and also at Board Level. First and foremost, it takes a lot of time to even produce this data assuming it is all done without bias and miscalculations or interpretations. Organizations then end up spending a lot of time investigating this topic (often annoying various stakeholders as they typically have to be defensive) to either accept the information and take corrective actions or prove the data is wrong and provide the actual information.

In any case this is a big drain for organizations as ideally Contracted ARR and Actuall ARR should match perfectly or in the ideal world, Actual ARR should exceed Contracted ARR with CRs pending to be loaded into the system.

In order to avoid this very expensive noise, there are various parameters an organization must watch from the day the Order Form is signed and loaded into the system. Each organization has a unique process for their S2D and further customer acceptance and billing. This is generally a very time bound, deliverable/milestone based process and any slip anywhere in the process will result in revenue loss.

RevGain integrates into this entire process and watches for signals that can be used to predict impending delays or possible failures in the customer onboarding and handoff process. The platform then makes live recommendations to the various teams involved in taking the precise Next Best Actions and deliver to the customer expectations for a smooth onboarding journey. As the initial experience during Onboarding journey often is carried through out the lifecycle of the customer, this is a very key aspect of operations that must be well run as in general an upset customer will not turn into a happy customer very easily or inexpensively and will be a drain on organization resources and overall brand image. On the contrary if this is handled well, the eco system will be vibrant with happy customers and improves the organization revenue stream through referral business which makes way for Capital Efficient Growth than the traditional channels.

Marketing Spend Vs Customer Advocacy Expenses

Organizations spend quite substantial amount their hard-earned revenue on marketing events to network with their customers for connects, awareness programs, lunch and learn etc. to enhance their relationships. Often times, these events that are held at great expense result in poor attendance or not much value generated post the event for a variety of reasons. On the other hand, it is quite common to have Customer Advocacy Programs of various levels of maturity with a simple mechanism of collecting CSAT/NPS to having strong Customer Advisory Boards composed of eminent experts in the industry. These activities also involve quite a bit of investment and coordination among various stakeholders internal and external and often seen as a conflict with the marketing team activities.

In practice, both approaches are very much needed for any organization. However, the expectations and measurements must be clearly defined and the KRAs/KPIs measured appropriately for both these areas. As an example, marketing events that include existing customer connects may be focused on upsell/cross-sell while Customer Advocacy Team may focus on better adoption rates and referrals for increasing the revenue.

These teams usually depend on different platforms and data sources to manage their activities and are disconnected at best. RevGain helps bring this data into an end-to-end correlation by customer, industry, region, persona etc. in order to be able to provide the data in a generative AI driven Chat interface for C-Suite executives to make their decisions as well give Next Best Actions to the field team for enhancing the customer experience while adding revenue and eliminating conflicts internally.

MQL Vs SAL Conflicts

Marketing team usually has a long-term outlook and use their BAND methodology to run their activities and their entire focus is to generate a pipeline of MQLs to meet their targets. Whereas, typical Sales Organization is extremely focused on their immediate deliverables such as meeting the revenue targets set for them in various categories. This results in a conflict between the two organizations that are ultimately focused on revenue generation as Sales Organization tends to reject the MQLs generated by the Marketing team as they do not see the immediate value which obviously is very myopic and not in the greater interest of the Organization. However, each of these teams must be focused on their respective targets as defined by their KRAs/KPIs resulting in a conflict and emotional confrontation posing a big challenge for the C-Suite to provide direction without appearing biased but yet keep the interest of the larger organization in focus.

RevGain can help in this situation with its holistic view of data correlation and contextual analysis to bridge the gap and position the Leads in respective categories on a time scale so that the right engagement is planned based on the Next Best Actions provided by the platform. This not only eliminates the conflicts but also helps the field teams to conduct their activities without having to waste time internally to resolve conflicts and keep the focus on revenue generation to achieve their individual, team and organization targets – all with a simple chat-based UI backed by RevGain’s autonomous predictive RevOps AI Engine.

Diverse Systems, Non-Aligned KPIs/Holistic View

Revenue Operations – what a paradigm shift !!!

RevOps by definition encompasses the vast and diverse Organization landscape including Finance, HR, Engineering, Support, Delivery, Sales, Marketing etc. While it may sound like a big corporate political landscape to navigate for the CRO role which may seem to blur the line between CEO and CRO, it is intended with a singular focus on optimizing revenue for the organization and have all teams work towards a common goal.

While this may sound too idealistic in real world, it is the way business have to conduct themselves in the current and foreseeable business landscape. Unfortunately, all these different functional areas have to work within the platforms that are specialized in their respective areas and data naturally gets siloed and fragmented. Even the larger Organization goals may conflict with the team/individual KRAs. This poses the problem of ingesting this massive and disparate data into a common platform and provide a singular, unified view that correlates the priorities of various functions and blends them into the larger Organization goals vis-à-vis revenue and customer satisfaction.

While all teams work towards this common goal assuming the KRAs are properly designed and instilled into the team, the complexity of bringing diverse channels of information remains a major issue for most organizations.

RevGain addresses this problem with their AI driven Open API Framework Engine that builds dynamic APIs which integrate the data from dozens of platforms that specialize in various functions such as CRM, ITSM, MarTech, ERP, Revenue Intelligence, CS, Communication Channels, Signals, Talent Management into a single Data Hub based on Vector Database architecture to provide Context Based, Prompt Engineered, correlated Data output for the C-Suite to make data driven decisions while providing live Next Best Actions to the on-ground teams.

Performance Management – Company, Individual, and Team

Past Performance Does Not guarantee Future results – Neither do Projections, Plans and Achievements Based on Hope or Prayer!!!

Organizations typically apply heuristics of past performance to lay the groundwork for their future business plans. Bad News. This is a failed model. Past does not predict future !!!

This is where a robust definition of Performance Management KPIs across the Organization, team and individual levels comes into play. If this aspect is not well defined with clear goals and objectives that can be measured, the results will be similarly unpredictable and often surprise in a negative way. Mere setting of these KPIs will not solve this concern. These need to be constantly measured and they should be available at individual, team and organization level in real time giving constant feedback with score-carding as well as provide recommendations on Next Best Actions based on actionable data sourced from a variety of platforms commonly used by various teams within the gamut of RevOps and elsewhere.

This daunting task can be achieved through RevGain’s advanced AI based algorithms that provide the Next Best Actions to individuals as a Co-Pilot and Coach in real time while also providing the higher level aggregation for Performance Management at Individual, Team, and Organization level as well as by products, features, industry segments, regions etc. in addition to providing Next Best Actions at the aggregation level to improve overall performance and also reward the right stakeholders.