Lack of real-time visibility in the revenue creation process is causing significant revenue leakage and inefficiency. In this blog post we highlight the importance of actionable sales insights in driving predictable revenue growth.

Visibility is a key to making smart decisions and driving revenue growth. Still today, many companies struggle with manual processes and uncertainty of the right actions.

Traditional sales reporting gives no control over revenue growth

Reporting is one of the most effective business areas to automate. Yet, many business leaders still regard automated reporting as an option, not a real necessity. Oftentimes this leads to not having control over revenue operations and growth.

• No clarity. Tracking the revenue performance from marketing, sales and customer success to invoicing is inconsistent and siloed. Making it practically impossible to track the end-to-end journey and overall performance of teams, regions, products or reps and spot opportunities and risks.

• No predictability. Inconsistency and blindspots in the revenue creation process leads to uncertainty in results and inaccuracy in revenue forecasting. Leaving revenue leaders with manual attempts to create predictions and the whole company in insecurity of future performance.

• No control. Focus in driving optimized results is lost. Companies have no means of aligning the revenue creation process and setting systematic goals, nor following or communicating the day-to-day goal attainment of critical growth indicators. Leaving the companies with lost focus, crucially delayed reactions and constant failures at achieving revenue goals.

Compiling accurate and meaningful data requires considerable effort

Sales and revenue reports are a collection of metrics that help to evaluate sales performance within a team, region, division or organization. Reports summarize the business’s revenue operations, typically including information on results, funnel, forecasts and revenue. Most common frequencies are weekly, monthly, quarterly and annual reports for sales and revenue teams, management, board of directors and investors. 

Traditionally, sales reports are created by manually collecting the data from various data sources, compiling complex spreadsheets, organizing and manipulating the data, generating the reports and sharing them via email. Processes are highly laborious and error prone and can lead into significant errors in interpretation. Manual processes cause prolonged reporting periods, inadequate insights and delayed decision-making. Businesses can lose significant amounts on potential revenue.

Sales automation is the key to boosting revenue and reducing costs

Companies are now quickly adopting automation as a key driver of cost efficiency and increased sales. Reporting, forecasting and analytics are amongst the most highly automatable activities with today’s technology. According to McKinsey, early adopters of sales automation consistently report increases in customer-facing time, higher customer satisfaction, efficiency improvements of 10 to 15 percent, and sales uplift potential of up to 10 percent.

Instead of spending hours collecting numbers, combining spreadsheets and pushing teams to enter the data, companies using automated sales reporting are more focused on driving increased revenue. Every 1:1, forecast call, and pipeline review becomes more efficient and productive.

Driving predictable revenue growth with actionable insights

Best-run businesses are today using comprehensive revenue platforms like Dear Lucy to optimize their entire revenue creation process. The platform automatically gathers data across revenue teams into one system and uses AI to synthesize the data into real-time status and actionable insights. This brings transparency, action and urgency to revenue acceleration leading into superior performance and predictable revenue growth.

Actionable insights are defined as insights which can help in making decisions and taking action to achieve desirable outcomes. A key element in building actionable insights is setting goals for KPIs and objectives and visualizing the goal attainment across the revenue creation funnel in real-time. 

Assess your revenue leak

Lack of real-time visibility into revenue insights means that every revenue-critical employee is falling short on results and your teams are wasting valuable time in manual processes for report generations. Here’s a simple model to estimate your company’s yearly revenue leakage.

Yearly quota x 10% + Time spent on reporting per week x hourly salary x 52 = Total yearly revenue leakage 

Example

Lost Quota: Your sales teams across the organization sum up to 40 people with yearly quotas of $500K each. On a yearly basis you’re looking to close $20M in total revenue. Lack of real-time visibility to revenue creation process will most probably cut 10% off your quota, leaving you with $2M of revenue leakage (when operating in SaaS, on a longer term the revenue leakage is $2M x expected lifetime of 3 years, totalling $6M).

Time spent on manual reporting: With manual reporting processes your RevOps, analytics and financial teams totalling 5 people will end up spending 3 hours per person per week on assembling revenue reports and forecasts, your 5 sales directors / team leads 3 hours each on verifying and analysing them and your sales team of 40 updating and correcting their own data and forecasts for 1 hour each week. This adds up to a total of 70 hours of valuable time wasted each week and leaving you with about $180K of salary expenses wasted on a yearly basis. 

With this calculation, your total yearly revenue leakage would be at $2,18M.

Interested?

Dear Lucy offers a highly powerful sales insight to drive predictable revenue growth.

Book a session with our expert to learn more!