White Label Application Description and Scope

Revenue productivity is a strategy to maximize the performance of teams using seller data, revenue analysis, sales training techniques, and front-line coaching. An emerging discipline, revenue productivity combines the sales enablement and revenue operations functions under one umbrella. It can also be used as a framework for business transformation projects, helping revenue leaders understand, predict, and adapt the in-field behavior of their teams to support their growth goals with greater reliability.

Revenue productivity touches virtually every aspect of the revenue organization. Chief revenue officers (CROs), chief sales officers (CSOs), heads of revenue operations, heads of training or enablement, and marketing are all involved in its inception and ongoing optimization. When implemented properly, it can increase the number of sellers that attain their quota, enhance the efficacy of sales management, and provide more predictable revenue forecasts and results.

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Table of Contents

What are the benefits of revenue productivity strategies & projects?

While revenue productivity can be a massive, ambitious transformation project, it’s also possible to start small with targeted, achievable use cases to demonstrate value. Revenue productivity benefits include:

  • Getting better alignment between your revenue operations and revenue enablement teams to optimize seller performance
  • Improving the accuracy of your revenue forecast by combining both seller data and deal data in your daily analysis
  • Creating more relevant sales enablement programs and content recommendations based on each seller’s individual needs
  • Providing more prescriptive coaching between frontline sales management and individual sales reps
  • Get a scientific understanding of how customer-facing skills – such as messaging comprehension, delivery, and buyer engagement – translates in revenue performance.
  • Identifying the key strengths and weaknesses of every revenue team and employee
  • Optimizing key value and product messages to resonate better in-market
  • Empowering sellers to easily customize their buyer experiences

What is a revenue productivity platform?

A revenue productivity platform helps companies analyze, train, enable, and coach their teams to better business outcomes. Built on one, integrated tech stack, it includes a variety of revenue applications that surround today’s CRM environments, including, but not limited to, sales readiness, sales forecasting, sales content management, conversation intelligence, sales coaching, and digital sales rooms. By utilizing a revenue productivity platform, companies can more reliably predict future outcomes, and eliminate several redundant applications across their organization in one investment.

A revenue productivity platform should allow a revenue organization to:

    • Build unified seller profiles for each team member, federating data about them from CRM deal data, sales meeting and buyer interactions, and their content usage externally
    • Analyze specific gaps of each revenue team and individual based on their skills, behaviors, and interactions with customers
    • Build a sales forecast based on both seller data and the CRM opportunities (deals) they’re working
    • Enhance performance through sales enablement, sales readiness, and sales coaching applications
    • Provide a centralized sales content management system for sellers to access and utilize relevant content
    • Empower sellers to orchestrate customized buyer experiences with digital sales rooms

Essential features for a revenue productivity
platform

Unified seller profiles

The basis for all the workflows in a revenue productivity platform starts with understanding all the data you have available about each seller, and unifying it around a single identifier, or a unified seller profile. A revenue productivity platform should be able to build these profiles by pulling in data about each seller from the following systems:
  • CRM data for deal and opportunity data
  • Sales engagement platforms for email and call interactions
  • Sales enablement and readiness applications for key skill, behavior and competency data
  • Call recording and conversation intelligence platforms
  • Sales content management for access and usage statistic

Revenue enablement features

Revenue & sales readiness

Revenue readiness applications provide a deep set of engagement mechanics to enhance seller knowledge, skill sets, messaging delivery, and product comprehension. These tools should include, but not be limited to:

  • Sales onboarding modules to ramp up sales reps on key concepts, industry knowledge, product and messaging comprehension
  • Guided paths for sellers to build knowledge, including quizzes, missions, leaderboards, and live challenges
  • Bite-sized learning quizzes and questions to reinforce key topics and enhance knowledge retention

Sales content management

These applications provide a central portal to manage, post, and access content to be used in external customer-facing interactions and internal sales training. These tools should include, but not be limited to:

  • Ability to post, curate, and organize content for sales’ usage in the field
  • Enable sales to easily share that content externally, and track how buyers engage with it
  • Have a single, unified data model to access content properly between externally-facing customer interactions and internally-facing training usage
  • Integrate with digital sales rooms, where sales can orchestrate a tailored experience for each customer

Sales coaching

Sales coaching applications provide a method for front-line sales management to give prescriptive feedback to every rep on their teams. These tools include:

  • Coaching forms and scorecards to document skill gaps for every rep
  • Ability to analyze sales rep interactions in calls and provide deal-level coaching to improve close rates
  • Governance features for revenue leadership to make specific asks of front-line management in their coaching plans

Revenue operations features

Conversation Intelligence

Conversation intelligence applications record calls between sellers and buyers, and provide deep analytics to understand the efficacy of those interactions. These tools include:

  • Automatically recording and scoring sellers on their buyer interactions
  • Leverage artificial intelligence and other analytics capabilities to understand the themes, messages, and signals from each meeting
  • Utilize call recording data to understand what deals will accelerate forward, and which will stall, and inform your sales forecast

Sales forecasting

Sales forecasting applications provide analytics and insights based on a combination of deal data and seller data to help you more accurately predict revenue outcomes by rep, P&L, business unit, or however you organize your revenue function. These tools should include:

  • Seamless integration with your CRM system to leverage relevant deal data
  • Usage of individual seller data to inform the forecast (many forecasting tools only use opportunity data, so this is important to evaluate)
  • Score deals based on real-world buyer interactions, such as buyer reactions in sales calls or their consumption of key content assets

Digital Sales Rooms

Digital Sales Rooms (DSRs) applications provide an easy way for sellers to orchestrate a specific buyer experience for every individual buyer. These tools should include:

  • A client-seller portal where a sales rep with no technical or coding experience can easily build a compelling experience for their customer
  • Ability to access all of the content within your sales content management system and recordings from your conversation intelligence tool
  • Analytics that help sellers and revenue leadership understand buyer engagement with the content delivered

How do you measure revenue productivity?

Revenue productivity strategies and initiatives hit virtually every part of the sales, ops, marketing, and sales enablement functions. As a result, there are several ways to measure the efficacy of the programs. Here, we break them down into four categories by specific department.

Sales rep performance

  • % of sellers hitting 100% of their quota
  • Conversion rate at key stage of sales & marketing funnel
  • Overall sales cycle length
  • Average deal sizes
  • Time to productivity
  • Win rates

Operational efficiency

  • Accuracy of sales forecast on weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis
  • Reducing number of sales tools surrounding CRM system
  • Percentage of teams adhering to process

Org readiness

  • Accuracy of sales forecast on weekly, monthly, and quarterly basis
  • Reducing number of sales tools surrounding CRM system
  • Percentage of teams adhering to process

Management efficacy

  • Team win rates
  • Customer and buyer satisfaction with reps
  • Sales cycle length per rep
  • Call scores by rep
  • Skill scores by rep

Marketing & content ROI

  • Resonance of seller interactions and content in sales meetings
  • Acceleration of sales cycle based on content usage
  • Sales usage rates of content assets

What stakeholders need to be involved in a revenue productivity strategy?

Regardless of the size of your business, revenue productivity is a business transformation project that should be driven by the office of revenue leadership. It then requires tight alignment across sales, marketing, sales, and revenue operations, sales enablement & training. Below is an overview of their roles.

Executive leadership: Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Sales Officer, and Head of Sales

The head of revenue or sales should set the direction for the overall business outcomes to drive from a revenue productivity project. They should use their overall influence to force some critical business decisions over a revenue productivity project, such as:

  • Establishing key business objectives for revenue productivity, such as overall revenue growth and individual seller productivity metrics
  • The decision to consolidate technology and data under one revenue productivity platform versus integrating point solution products, or some version of each
  • Management cadence for discussing, analyzing and discussing revenue productivity initiatives
  • Holding front-line management, marketing, sales enablement, and ops accountable to overall business goals
  • Creating a cadence around org readiness to be discussed alongside forecasting and pipeline reviews

Analysis & optimization: Head of Sales Ops or Revenue
Operations

The sales and revenue operations function is used to manage the bulk of sales’ day-to-day CRM needs
across the org. They usually have responsibility for opportunity management, account management,
forecasting, deal desk, configure price quote, among many other critical functions. Relative to a revenue
productivity project, the ops leader will assume the following responsibilities:

Audit of adjacent CRM applications

While all roads lead to the CRM, the average sales team leverages 10 additional tools to get their job done. Part of revenue productivity is determining where there can be meaningful consolidations of functionality to create greater org simplicity. Ops will help with organizing this audit, and the appropriate vendor management.

 

Overall approach to data unification

In addition to CRM account, customer, and opportunity deal data, RevOps should own the approach for what systems a revenue productivity project will pull data from for seller insight, such as sales readiness apps, sales content management, sales engagement, and call recording tools.

Strategy for analytics, insights, and reporting

Organizational maturity for revenue analytics and revenue intelligence can vary from basic spreadsheeting to sophisticated sales forecasting software. As part of a revenue productivity strategy, Ops will develop dashboards and insights to predict organizational performance by rep, team, and product line, and make that persistently available to revenue management. They should also own forecasting strategy at a weekly, monthly, quarterly, and annual level.

Recommendations for optimization

Whether manual or automated, ops should establish recommendations for content, training, and coaching to influence upstream performance. This is a major change related to a revenue productivity strategy, given that most forecasts today are simply based on deal data.

Training & content: Head of Sales Enablement, Head of
Product Marketing, and Head of Marketing

Organizations can analyze performance forever, but at a certain point, they need to transform the
behaviors of their people to drive better business outcomes. As part of a revenue productivity strategy,
sales enablement needs to play a leading role in developing training programs that map to the specific
needs, gaps, and opportunities found by their partners in sales operations and management.

A major change to the role of sales enablement in an org embracing revenue productivity strategies is
to rethink the approach to the enablement calendar. Rather than having events like kickoffs, weekly
internal webinars, and other stand-and-deliver events as core to their planning, it instead puts the
sellers front-and-center with a customized program for each one. Luckily, if you work in a big
organization, this doesn’t mean literally designing one for each rep. Sales readiness technologies are
advancing to deliver content and training based on segmentation, just like marketers do to personalize
email for customers, as an example.

Program design by skillset and activity

Sales enablement should be prepared to design programs for key behaviors, attributes, and skillsets identified during analysis. They need to be prepared to use a full set of engagement mechanics to give sellers many different looks at engagement, such as missions, quizzes, leaderboards, and learning series. Ready-to-deploy templates can also help you quickly scale new programs as they’re required.

Personalized training experiences triggered from management analysis

Within the flow of revenue analysis tools, enablement should be able to automatically assign the right content for each seller. For example, if someone exudes strength in the discovery phase of the sales process in their meeting recordings and analysis, there is less need to run that seller through more discovery training. But if they show weakness in negotiations, the system should emphasize a training plan that focuses on that critical gap.

Leverage real-world insight to optimize programs

Tapping into conversation intelligence tools, the sales enablement and training pro will identify key themes and messages working in-market, and adjust their programs accordingly. They will also partner with ops to understand what sales rep behaviors show a higher propensity to close business.

Frontline coaching: Sales Management

Every revenue productivity will fail without the engagement of frontline sales management. They need
to actively be a part of understanding the readiness of the reps they manage, and be prepared to make
adjustments. Their role includes:

Deal coaching

By listening to calls from their reps, and leveraging analytics to understand key moments and themes, they will leverage a toolset to provide instant feedback to correct the course of an opportunity.

Skill coaching

As patterns are detected across multiple deals, they will choose relevant training and content for their sellers based on the key gaps identified.

Monitoring of key gaps and opportunities

Based on the agreed reports from ops and revenue leadership, they will constantly view and assess the skills of reps within their management purview.

What are the key elements of a revenue
productivity strategy?

When building a revenue productivity strategy, it can be a daunting process to assess every single
aspect of your organization. Mindtickle suggests the following four areas to organize your efforts from
a team, process, and technology approach.

Data Unification

Key owner: RevOps
It’s critical to understand the critical data points for your revenue productivity project. Your revenue productivity
platform will help you federate these around a singular seller ID. But first, you have to suss
out the data that matters.

Deal coaching

By listening to calls from their reps, and leveraging analytics to understand key moments and themes, they will leverage a toolset to provide instant feedback to correct the course of an opportunity.

Skill coaching

As patterns are detected across multiple deals, they will choose relevant training and content for their sellers based on the key gaps identified.

Monitoring of key gaps and opportunities

Based on the agreed reports from ops and revenue leadership, they will constantly view and assess the skills of reps within their management purview.

Revenue analysis

Key owner: RevOps

Once you have your data unified around individual sellers and teams, it’s critical to provide a centralized analysis of that data. This can be visualized through revenue intelligence, sales forecasting, and customized business intelligence tools. Ideally, you want to instrument the following components for your analysis:

Develop ideal rep profiles. RevOps should plot the critical attributes, behaviors, and engagement by top performing reps, and codify them into an ideal rep profile. Depending on the size of your revenue organization, this may vary based on the business unit, product line, or region. Before even applying technology to this challenge, you should align with stakeholders on the critical points you believe to be anecdotally important, and then begin pulling in data to validate.

Predictive cohort analysis. You want to be able to analyze an entire cohort of sales reps by a specific team, such as product line sales or regional sales. By isolating pockets of optimal and sub-optimal performance, you can better predict their likelihood of hitting quota.

Forecasting based on deals, and the personnel working them. It’s important to understand what deals are most likely to close based on the attributes of every opportunity, as well as based on the attributes of the sellers working the deal. You want to develop an early alert system of key changes as they happen and their impact on your forecast. This starts with understanding the full spectrum of systems you need to pull that data from for analysis, including CRM, conversation intelligence, and sales enablement systems. You want to be able to sort this for both short-term (weekly, monthly), and long-term (quarterly, annual) views.

Cadence for activity reporting. In sales, the quantity and quality of activity still matter. Analyze key metrics for buyer engagement – such as emails, calls, and content usage – to better understand what actions are moving deals forward or stalling them out.
Content analysis by sales stage. For all the content leveraged in seller communications and buyer interactions, it’s critical your team maps how that content accelerates or hinders deals. Content that people “feel” works may not jive with the reality of what works.To work as part of a revenue productivity workflow, it’s critical that, once gaps are identified in your org, you can automatically trigger those experiences as part of your performance optimization tools (reference that section).

Performance improvement

Key owners: Sales enablement, Front-line sales management
Your revenue analysis should yield specific skill and behavior gaps of your revenue organization. From
here, you want to utilize sales readiness and sales coaching tools to begin enhancing the overall
readiness of each customer-facing employee. Ideally, these tools should have the following:

Deal coaching

By listening to calls from their reps, and leveraging analytics to understand key moments and themes, they will leverage a toolset to provide instant feedback to correct the course of an opportunity.

Skill coaching

As patterns are detected across multiple deals, they will choose relevant training and content for their sellers based on the key gaps identified.

Monitoring of key gaps and opportunities

Based on the agreed reports from ops and revenue leadership, they will constantly view and assess the skills of reps within their management purview.

Buyer engagement

Key owners: Sales Enablement; Sales reps; Marketing
Revenue productivity strategies require that customer-facing employees and sellers can easily pivot
their performance improvements into compelling interactions with prospective buyers and current
customers. You should have the following tools to assist your approach to buyer interactions.

Sales content management strategy

You need to build a centralized system, process, and approach for sellers accessing, sharing, and distributing content. It’s also critical that the providers of this content – namely, marketing and sales enablement – have the proper governance and administration of this content. Ideally, content should be recommended to the seller based on identified issues with their deal or sales process.

Rep-led orchestration of the buyer experience

Gone are the days of sending content purely over email or linking to company websites. For revenue productivity to be maximized, sellers will require the ability to build customized experiences for their buyer and be able to analyze their engagement with those. This should be inclusive of sales decks, PDFs, RPFs, and guides. It should also include all of the recordings with that customer for both parties to conveniently access.

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