Subscription business models are becoming the norm. Subscription models where the customer pays a scheduled usage fee per agreed-on period have become very popular. Such annuity revenue streams are very attractive and have penetrated many sectors as either rental- or performance-based fee models. How to transform one's portfolio into a subscription model is one of the core questions we hear from many companies.
The customer success function is moving beyond software as a service (SaaS) companies as people recognize its value add. Cloud companies natively understand the value of the customer ownership experience and have been pioneers in setting up “customer success” teams that manage the onboarding, activation, and training of new customers. That concept of a customer success function has migrated into many other industrial and technology businesses as a best practice.
Service leaders come from many different backgrounds – often project management – and hold many different titles. Yet the access to customer intelligence in this “function” rivals and maybe even beats marketing's data sets. This is a new, emerging space on the org chart that is worth watching.
The three teams work hard and do their best, but somehow things just aren't clicking.
Stepping back into the CEO shoes, there are common observations from all the functions.
Change is everywhere: Not only does change scare people, but it raises questions about whether the benefits of transformation are worth the pain.
Real-world problems are interdependent and interdisciplinary: Regardless of what its org chart looks like, any business needs to manage the entire revenue cycle as an integrated whole before, during, and after the transaction.
A systems-based approach is required: Consistency, repeatability, and automation help ensure that good performance is sustainable over time and scalable.
About Our Research
This book combines primary and proprietary research, a deep analysis of existing academic and corporate material in the field, consultations with world-class experts and thought leaders, and finally our own decades of personal experience as practitioners and analysts in the business world. As only teaming up an authority on go-to-market transformation and an operational executive can do, we argued over big-picture and minute details. In the end, we both agreed on what the real issue is and what needed to be done.
The foundation of the book is our primary research. This includes thousands of surveys with executives, managers, and performance professionals who manage growth in large and small businesses across many industries. When we reference our surveys, we will cite the actual survey and source document in a citation.
We also conducted in-depth interviews with over 110 growth leaders. These generally included the most senior executive responsible for growth in the business. In many cases it was the President, CEO, or Chief Operating Officer because that was the only individual who managed all the growth functions – marketing, sales, and service. In other cases, we met with executives that had been given an expanded remit to align revenue teams and resources around the customer. These executives had titles like Chief Growth Officer and Chief Revenue Officer. In some other cases we interviewed the functional leaders of marketing, sales, and services. Sometimes these executives insisted on being interviewed together because they regarded themselves as a team, not a manager. We will reference these interviews in statistics and direct quotes and will use the material for case studies about their challenges, best practices, and accomplishments.
In addition to this primary research, we made an exhaustive analysis of academic research and commercial research on the subject, which are also cited in the text. Our team comprehensively analyzed the most meaningful and relevant academic and commercial research on the science of growth. Here we were lucky enough to have the support of the leaders of the Marketing Sciences Institute, The Marketing Accountability Standards Board, The Sales Management Association, Analytics@Wharton, the Association of National Advertisers (ANA), and many associations and partners. These studies and academic papers are cited directly with links to the complete research reports and publications provided in the citations at the end of the book.
Finally, this research initiative drew heavily on the experiences and expertise of the world-class practitioners, academics, and experts of the Revenue Enablement Institute. These world-class experts include sales and marketing executives like Jeff McKittrick, Michael Smith, Greg Munster, Bruce Rogers, and David Edelman. They also include leading academics like Professor David Reibstein and Raghu Iyengar from the Wharton School of Business. We also were able to tap into decades of experience from experts in the science of growth including Cam Tipping, Bob Kelly, Corey Torrence, Bruce Rogers, Michael Smith, Doug Laney, and Howard Brown. All of these experts are quoted directly in the body of the book.
Our analysis of the commercial technology ecosystem was based on a comprehensive analysis of over 4,000 technologies that support sales and marketing over the past 18 months. Using the Revenue Operating System that you'll learn about in the book as a filter, we arrived at an initial list of the top 100 that we believe are transforming the commercial model and enabling the emergence of Revenue Operations, a system for growth. While this list is dynamic and will evolve over time, these initial 100 innovators are mentioned in context in the body of the book, and a full list is available on a website and research report listed in the citations.
Finally, it's important to mention that we, the authors, have obviously colored this analysis with our own background and experience. Thankfully, that experience includes senior leadership and c-level roles at growth businesses and innovators like Oracle, SAP, Schneider Electric, United Rentals, Siemens, GE, and Citigroup. Ideally, this personal history helped us synthesize our research with a more practical perspective and amplified the solutions we outline with conviction of people who have been there. We've sat in the board rooms and management meetings trying to push growth agendas. We've made the hard decisions on where and how much capital to invest in different initiatives. And most importantly, we've lived with the consequences of those decisions.
The Bottom Line
Executives and managers today are using outdated twentieth-century tools to govern and manage twenty-first-century businesses. These archaic twentieth-century management tools were built around a functional structure that sought a balance between the responsiveness of a strong local presence and the efficiency of centralized, global-scale operations. Today's reality is different, and personalized offerings delivered with the efficiency of global scale are expected. We're fighting a different battle between fragmentation and alignment. To connect the dots and layer in the science of growth, data, insight, and knowledge must be shared throughout the organization to provide them the EQ, the IQ, and the bias for actions that deliver results.
That's what this book is all about: Revenue Operations, a bold system to steadily drive growth in the twenty-first century. We'll take you through three core sections. Part I defines Revenue Operations and its impact. Part II articulates the key pillars that make up the management system and helps you decide which leadership model works best for you. Part III lays out the building blocks of the operating system for your business. Here we focus on improving the return on your technology, data, process, and team investments and on giving you a good sense of the priority capital investments you need to make. In Part IV we bring it all together with the concept of Smart Actions and provide you tools to best implement Revenue Operations for your own company.
This book will help owners, CEOs,