(BPT) - In an increasingly complex world, successful businesses need to see the big picture in order to excel and grow. Understanding and optimizing the revenue lifecycle can help you see beyond the day-to-day or quarter-to-quarter needs and goals of your business.
What is the revenue lifecycle?
Revenue is your organization’s fuel. Seeing revenue as a lifecycle means maximizing your customer relationships, as well as their lifetime value. It also means recognizing the many personas that comprise the lifecycle stages — sales, product, legal, operations, finance and customer service — and that everyone aligns and supports the model of revenue as a lifecycle.
Complexities arise from the ever-changing nature of the revenue operations landscape, which impacts an organization's path to revenue predictability. When your business has multiple products and revenue types, the path to operationalizing these too frequently is through a patchwork of siloed manual processes, systems and teams. As a result, creating seamless customer and employee experiences becomes even more challenging.
Organizations often operate without consolidated pricing and discounting. There may be no history of products and services customers had through one division or another, and there's also complexity around contracting. Many have legacy contracts with preexisting governing terms and conditions — and if they’re added to the company through a merger or acquisition, there could be multiple contracts with one customer. Many organizations must also navigate the intricacies of regulatory compliance and risk management, creating even more complexity.
Even if your organization manages to integrate its products and services with its pricing models and contracting standards, management and fulfillment of those products and services become even more complicated in the backend. Many areas tend to be locked in different enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, billing systems or order management systems, making it difficult to see what products or services a customer has at any given time.
The ability to lay the groundwork so an organization can easily sell new products and services with new contract terms and conditions over the customer lifecycle is essential.
“Every company is dealing with its unique complexities. Increasing complexity requires process unification and standardization. Our company is laser-focused on helping customers crush their revenue lifecycle complexities to increase revenue certainty,” explains Randy Littleson, chief marketing officer, Conga. “Today we can deliver the breadth of capabilities modern-day companies need to effectively manage their revenue lifecycle.”
How specific tools can streamline processes throughout the revenue lifecycle
A global leader in scalable revenue lifecycle management solutions, Conga provides products and services to help businesses increase revenue certainty, using AI-powered capabilities to deliver faster, smarter experiences for customers and employees alike.
Revenue lifecycle management is unifying and automating all revenue generating processes to maximize customer lifetime value. To improve your company’s revenue lifecycle, you first need to automate processes to remove manual steps that slow the path to revenue — and that can introduce the potential for human error.
Propose and quote: Throughout the revenue lifecycle, configure, price and quote (CPQ) solutions allow companies to sell more easily and effectively by configuring pricing, managing discounting, ensuring that proposed configurations actually work and can be delivered to customers and by streamlining the quoting and proposal processes, using tools like automated document generation.
Next, you need to unify currently disparate adjacent processes. To achieve this, contract lifecycle management (CLM) solutions unify, automate and standardize revenue lifecycle processes across all teams to create one fully visible revenue lifecycle — not several, fragmented ones.
Negotiate and execute: CLM solutions help achieve efficiency and gain strategic insights. CLM manages the entire contract lifecycle for you — negotiating, redlining, approvals, storing of agreements and more — to empower sales to get deals done faster, while ensuring that legal can manage compliance and risk. Your contract center infrastructure (CCI) lets you manage all contracts with AI-driven insights to manage risk and obligations while uncovering new opportunities. Using eSignature solutions is also essential to managing each function of the lifecycle, allowing documents to be generated with data from anywhere and signed easily, so you can seal the deal.
Manage and fulfill: Without sacrificing your customer’s experience during the billing process, you can free your sales teams to focus on customers. Make it easier to up-sell or cross-sell services to your loyal, happy customers using an automated billing system.
Renew and expand: Business viability means acquiring new customers and — more importantly — retaining them. For example, using an automated process for executing renewals will lead to higher renewal rates and delighted customers. Seeing the entire revenue lifecycle, you'll know which accounts are coming up for renewal and your customers’ propensity to buy.
“Businesses cannot afford to be slowed by cumbersome manual processes,” says Grant Peterson, chief product officer, Conga. “The level of automation we provide gives a business revenue predictability. Conga crushes complexity in an increasingly complex world, simplifying your path to revenue.”
Making sure the revenue lifecycle of your business runs with optimal efficiency benefits your company, your teams — and the experience of your clients and business partners. Learn more at Conga.com.
