Revenue Operations and Intelligence

What is Revenue Operations and Intelligence?

Revenue operations and intelligence (RO&I) has been defined as technologies or processes that provide actionable insights through leveraging buyer signals and interactions with specific products or brands. These insights help present revenue data that will help continuously improve execution performance and optimization of the revenue engine through effective go-to-market (GTM) functions.

Companies use RO&I to improve several areas of a business, including productivity, sales engagement, revenue forecasting, and other revenue operations.

Why is Revenue Intelligence Important?

RO&I has become a business priority due to the recognition of buyer engagement as a valuable metric in marketing analytics. B2B organizations are now obligated to integrate buyer engagement, relationships, and activity into the marketing mix and use these insights to enhance delivered value, boost revenue operations, and improve the overall buying experience.

Resource planning also benefits from RO&I by leveraging sales engagement insights to help optimize the performance of customer-facing resources, which helps predict buyer behavior and increase predictable revenue. It offers a new value proposition by filling the gaps in between existing technology categories in insight, user experience, and execution. This consequently helps in improving overall operations through understanding buyer behavior and marketing automation.

RO&I also assists in the creation of a “scoring system” that improves the accuracy of forecasting through greater transparency into the sales process and accountability of all sales engagement and revenue teams. This allows revenue leaders and those in the frontline to prioritize opportunities and leverage buyer signals through a quantifiable scoring system for sales engagement and deal probability. 

How Does Revenue Intelligence Work?

The effectiveness of RO&I rely on the organization of available technologies in a manner that supports the customer journey as best they can. The RO&I platform acts as the center of core revenue intelligence and operations, pulling revenue data from different systems and leveraging the power of machine learning (ML) and artificial intelligence (AI) to create revenue forecast models. These models help stakeholders and decision makers to plan, strategize, and meet sales targets using relevant and updated data.

An RO&I platform allows the technology and processes of the organization to work together seamlessly toward more open channels for communication, goal-sharing, and the free flow of data. Organizations will have different tech stacks depending on the nature of their business, but the following are essential components of effective RO&I.

Revenue operations platform

This allows for the integration of revenue functions into a centralized business intelligence (BI) tool. Through this platform, an organization can collect and analyze data through the combination of marketing analytics, predictive analytics, and sales forecasting. 

Data enrichment tools

These tools, also known as data appending tools, are designed to refine and improve gathered raw and revenue data. Specifically, they are used to integrate internal and external data to enable the creation of richer prospect and customer profiles.

Sales engagement tools

These tools help enhance the interactions between buyers and sellers through the administration of multiple channels. They also help streamline the seller workflow by leveraging revenue data integration and marketing automation systems.

Marketing automation systems

These allow marketing and sales teams to automate online marketing campaigns and activities to maximize efficiency. With the help of automation systems, sales teams can improve their go-to-marklet (GTM) strategies and focus on product enhancement and providing additional business value to buyers.

What are the Considerations Before Implementing a Revenue Intelligence Platform?

The implementation of an RO&I platform into your organization’s systems doesn’t necessarily mean a change in your current tech stack and technology roadmap. However, your approach to technology and how you use your digital tools should be revisited.

Typically, the marketing, operations, and revenue intelligence teams select the tools to be used for RO&I because these are the teams that benefit most. Regardless of which team needs it the most, effective implementation of RO&I should result in a single data set from which the different teams within the organization can work.

An RO&I platform assists in the creation of processes that work toward increased sales engagement and revenue generation. The right platform should be able to set the necessary KPI’s and automated processes seamlessly for the different teams in your organization. Below are some major considerations when choosing an RO&I platform.

An intuitive interface

An effective revenue operations strategy is only as good as the platform that supports it. Without the proper tools, it can be challenge to ensure its success. providing easy-to-use yet robust software solutions will also help reduce the learning curve for users and allow for quicker turnaround times.

An applicable feature set

Choosing the greatest and latest is almost always the best choice, however, you must also consider how your organization will be using the platform. Some solutions can be bloated with features that are of no use to you, and if the software is new, some features may not be fully developed and may only slow you down instead of optimize your processes.

Flexibility

A wide range of features allows a platform to be more flexible and can provide additional value depending on your requirements. This also provides additional options for interoperability, which helps in the integration of the platform with other business applications.

Long-term usability

When choosing an RO&I platform, you shouldn’t only consider your current needs, but how it will work for you in the future. Your needs will change as your business grows and the amount of data gathered increases. Regular software updates and reliable tech support ensure that functionality is maintained and improved over time. 

RO&I and Digital Transformation

Digital transformation has been a main goal for businesses because it’s a way to future-proof a company. RO&I is poised to augment digital efforts of businesses by providing what traditional business intelligence (BI) tools can’t. These include data diagnostics or identifying data anomalies, automation of setup and configuration, and predictive and prescriptive analytics.

The amount of data an organization gathers, processes, and analyzes continues to increase as the business grows. Determining which data to trust is critical because data accuracy and security is dependent on this. An RO&I platform connects data from different teams and creates a single source of truth (SSOT).

The SSOT allows for better insights from data that lead to better digital adoption and higher campaign success rates. Ultimately, RO&I allows organizations to operationalize revenue growth at scale while also providing visibility to both stakeholders and frontlines.