Subscription selling is about real-time visibility and velocity
Gokul Anantha
In the many years traversing service and software product revenue models, a vast majority of sales & channel organizations continue to focus on point-in-time quarterly pipeline / funnel reporting — for e.g. deals in the funnel (by stage, by rep, by account), deals closed, new opportunities in the pipeline.
This translates, by and large, to a focus on 1–2 large deals to make a successful quarter.
However, with the strategic shift to subscription models, driving predictable Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR) growth becomes paramount. Funnel-based revenue KPI reporting/monitoring does not provide your organization a perspective of interventions or optimizations in sales processes that will scale predictable and growing ARR.
Subscription selling is a team responsibility
And in an increasingly digital-first, distributed model, ARR growth is a function of close coordination between & by sales ops, direct / channel sales, sales finance, contracts, and product teams.
This applies, increasingly in a B2B context, even if products are priced for transactional selling. Converting early (& qualified) leads into early adopters into paying customers into bigger paying customers need multiple moving processes to come together for success.
Real-time visibility helps ( 100%)
Predictable revenue stream necessitates continuous process optimization to an evolving buying or customer context.
As a SalesOps leader, here is what you need to do:
1) Including on-demand revenue velocity metrics into KPI reporting
Great if you already do. If not , we recommend tracking both a) lead velocity and b) sales velocity in real-time.
2) While much focus is on SDR productivity , focus on insights that also lead to sales-cycle optimization . Here is an illustrative list of actionable insights to seek out:
a) How is ‘lead — opportunity and opportunity- closure cycle time trending? What states (stages) in revenue lifecycles are trending faster (or slower)? Is an intervention needed to improve sales cycle time, win-rate?
b) Did ‘qualified’ opportunities regress? How often? How late? Why?
c) Are platform enhancements as well as additional enablement interventions impacting sales cycle, win-rate, velocity? For example, has automated lead assignment reduced sales cycle & improved sales velocity?
d) How is win-rate trending?
e) Where are delays/bottlenecks? How significant are these? For example, did delays in quoting or contracting impact win-rate, velocity, sales cycle time?
f) Are some territory, product, sales team sales cycles faster than others? Should sales methodology be refined? Do different products/segments need different sales methodologies?
f) Are initiatives around Goal setting, territory re-assignments, incentives impacting sales process effectiveness? For which business/product segments are the impacts significant in terms of velocity, win-rate, sales cycle time?
3) Explore platforms that seamlessly deliver real-time insights and process visibility while supporting collaboration. Think BigPicture!
To know more about how we can help, reach us at info@loglens.io
Gokul Anantha
Gokul started his career heading a CRM service line at HCL Technologies. Over 20+ years , he has led revenue growth at Cognizant, Trianz and most recently at SAP, communication services business unit pursuing both product and sales led strategies. Loglens and its flagship platform BigPicture© is the outcome of personal experiences
