Here at Walpole Partnership we are passionate about helping organisations streamline business process flows in their systems. This means that we understand how front office joins up to the back office, how the cycles of Awareness-to-Lead, Opportunity-to-Quote, and Order-to-Billing and to Cash, flow perfectly in synchronous harmonised lock-step quickly and efficiently.
And that can be easy… for some organisations…
So, say you have a well-defined market, you have clear personas of who you want to attract. You design great content, which attracts those people that want to buy from you. And you can clearly market to them and attract them to your offering.
You have products that are the right fit for your clients. The products are simple and you sell through an efficient sales process. Your clients pass through your marketing and sales funnels, you create your opportunities, you sell to them.
But of course in a B2B world, it’s not always that simple. There can be complexities in the buyer personas that you’re looking to attract. They might be very varied. We certainly find that in our line of work.
The Challenger Sales Methodology states you may be selling to on average seven different people within an organisation, all of whom have very different wants and needs. So you do your utmost to attract those target contacts. And once you’ve attracted them, then you need to define the opportunity. Okay, setting up a CRM to track the people involved in the opportunities is pretty straightforward. But getting good intelligent dashboard reporting out of it is a challenge where you need experience in order to design the system in a way that gives you the information that you need to run your business or the automation, and/or the efficiency in the flow to orchestrate the touch points with the customer, at every stage of the sales cycle, just right.
And that’s just the easy bit. Then we get into the complexity. This is where we get into your configuration, pricing and quoting.
How do you actually turn an opportunity into something that your organisation can sell (and can be in control of the selling of) in the way the customer wants to buy.
Here we’re talking about managing your product setup to make sure you take all the variations of the product that you need into account, as well as the approval levels, the pricing controls, the auditability, the accountability, and the reporting (again), on what is quoted, what is offered, what is won, what is lost.
And then we have the billing. So if we’re taking an order and processing it quickly and efficiently, that’s great if you’re dealing with a one-time purchase, but what if it’s a subscription? Or if it has usage-based or recurring billing, or an item or a license that’s charged on a periodical basis. Yearly, monthly or even weekly or daily. Or a mixture of all the above!?
All of this adds significant complexity. Not just setting up a first order, but also adding a change order into the system. Say a client wants more licenses. They bought twelve on ‘day one’ of a 12-month contract and they want another three licenses three and half months in. What does that do to the billing? Why does it change if they terminate? What happens when they add an extra feature to their system? How does your billing system cope with that?
At Walpole we’ve got the experience of working at all stages of the awareness-to-cash cycle, and we have the ability to unpick the complexity and advise on where to simplify or align to best practice. We consult on the best way to parametrise and advise on the optimum way to get your front and back office joined up.
We get diverse functional teams talking to each other and working together so that your salespeople spend less time on admin and your admin people spend less time unpicking sales.
The end result is cleaner revenue streams, better efficiency, lower costs, and a streamlined process from end-to-end. Letting the business flow.
‘How to make Revenue Automation work for you’ was written by Walpole Partnership’s Managing Director, Andy Pieroux.
Get in touch with our senior consultants, Martin Gogué or Ingmar Hermans, so that they can make their expert knowledge in Revenue Automation come alive for your organisation.
