Solutions to build an agile and scalable strategy

As Forbes puts it: "The customer experience has emerged as the primary basis of competition as digitally enabled customers armed with better information and access are putting a premium on speed, agility, personalized content, and channel integration. This has created pressure on organizations to establish a single cross functional commercial process across the enterprise and coordinate across management systems and platforms to ensure a unified customer experience as the performance goal."

Technology is not everything, but having the right tech can help revenue operations teams to focus on strategy by saving time on building and aligning processes or waiting for technical teams to develop bespoke functionalities in different systems. 

A lack of connectivity between systems is one of the biggest frustrations we've come across within revenue operations teams. It's one of those things where once you've experienced the alternative it's hard to imagine how you managed for so long. 

Lots of companies have disconnected systems and tools that have been accumulated over time. Most of these will not have been developed specifically for subscription businesses, and instead will have a subject specific leaning—perhaps they were created with a native focus on marketing automation, sales quotes or customer support, for example. Furthermore, each system and functionality will most likely be at a different maturity level, making the custom development to connect them and develop functionalities together almost impossible.

In subscription businesses, more than any other, connectivity between platforms is essential for managing everything, including revenue operations, giving them the flexibility needed for a company to grow and evolve. For example, where a traditional sales tool will enable basic functions, it won't be built with the necessary logic to automate subscription contract changes, which is fine if you only have one client. However, it’s ripe for error and time consumption at scale, unless every team member knows the system like the back of their hand. That, in turn, can have a negative impact on the customer experience.

That said, while connectivity between systems is important, not every team needs access to everything all the time—that in itself can be unnecessarily overwhelming. A unified approach alone cannot only reduce project complexity and often at a premium. There needs to be a balance between a unified system and one that enables flexibility.

How tech can help

keylight has the flexibility to embed components in a unified system that you choose. It offers the opportunity to build continuous and dynamic customer relationships with the logic to automate recurring, and sometimes conditional recurring, processes for flexibility, instead of using expensive and binary custom system modifications.

Onboarding products, pricing and dependencies for customer segments can be tricky when managing large or international sales organizations, especially if you have channel reselling partners to consider as well. Growing product catalogs as well as individual customizations, offers and conditions tailored to individuals can become cumbersome to track, and can lead to errors such as compounding discounts that get lost in the system. 

Finding the right product can also be incredibly confusing and time consuming for teams who want to focus on maximizing revenue and getting on with their job. Done manually, these customizations mean revenue operations teams can easily lose clarity on what's going on due to architectural complexity and communication issues.

How tech can help

Predefined conditions and guided-selling can simplify the processes to enable sales teams and partners to sell to customers more easily, which is an important capability in maximizing revenue, team productivity and job satisfaction as well. Having technologies in place that natively support this can help the revenue operations team to save time on alignment, define clear processes as well as fortify and scale revenue. 

Clearly defining strategic and operational roles, making sure sales processes are tailored for customer segments is vital for optimizing the customer lifetime value, but to do that in an informed and strategic way requires technology that creates a set of processes that are both uniform for the brand and flexible enough to tailor to individual use cases. This minimizes the team's time worrying about how to create the right product, reduces the risk of error and maximizes the customer's likelihood of getting the right result for them. In turn, that's most likely to lead to retaining their customers long-term.

Data continues to be king in the digital world, and for revenue operations teams, the right data is fundamental to understanding the customer and their relationship with key touch points in the customer journey. This is hard to achieve with lots of different, disconnected platforms, tools and manual processes in place. For example, in conventional subscription billing solutions, transaction events are the primary type of information by which teams analyze customer journeys. Doing things this way makes seeing the relationships between customer actions such as upgrades and downgrades challenging—if not limited to guesswork.


How tech can help

To achieve that all-important bird's-eye view of revenue and performance, revenue operations teams not only need a unified subscription platform, but also one that collects the right customer events, allowing teams to see the relation between them. 

Having a unified platform that is built with the customer journey in mind and that collects events in a way that can be understood for the customer behavior means that teams see an ongoing dialogue between the customer and their actions. This helps the team to better understand what they want, where issues may lie, and how to improve sales outcomes.