New study predicts the technology cost per front-line seller will grow to $10,000 and identifies $1 Trillion in market value from the top 100 technologies that enable digital, data-driven selling.
The Revenue Enablement Institute announced immediate availability of its comprehensive report, the Revenue Operating System, which examines the growing cost and complexity of selling as it becomes a capital intensive, data-driven, and digital team sport. The report chronicles how the overwhelming customer preference for digital engagement – amplified by a revolution in AI and explosion in new digital touch points and innovations – has reallocated two thirds of growth budgets to “owned” digital selling channels. This has made the commercial infrastructure and data that support digital selling some of the largest financial assets on firm balance sheets.
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The Revenue Operating System report chronicles this evolution and quantifies the challenges business leaders face in trying to manage the complex, interdependent group of channels and systems required to grow in the 21st Century.
Growing customer preference for owned digital channels has made selling more complex, capital intensive, and data-driven
“Over the last 40 years, owned digital channels and data-driven selling systems have come to dominate the go-to-market,” says Chris Hummel, a Managing Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute and the reports co-author. “We’ve reached a tipping point where the cost, complexity and interdisciplinary nature of selling has rendered traditional models for managing the teams, operations, and systems that support the revenue cycle obsolete.”
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This 91-page analysis:
- Quantifies how a “perfect storm” of five demographic, technology, and business trends have fundamentally reshaped the allocation of growth resources, operating budgets, and capital investments over the last four decades;
- Proposes a new model – the Revenue Operating System – a system designed to help business leaders unlock the potential of their large and complex commercial technology portfolios to generate more scalable and sustainable growth;
- And profiles a dynamic ecosystem of 100 technology platforms that are converging to enable this system for growth by connecting the technology, data, and content assets across the business to improve channel performance, better allocate resources, develop talent, grow margins, and differentiate the customer experience.
Collectively, these 100 technologies have grown to reach a combined market value of nearly $1 Trillion, including 16 “Revenue Operations Unicorns” valued at over $1 Billion each. This group has attracted $4.7 Billion in VC and Private Equity investment in the last year to fuel product innovation and 13 acquisitions as they compete to “connect the dots” across the commercial technology ecosystem and narrowly defined point solutions and software categories converge around a more interconnected system for growth – including the CRM, Sales Enablement, Sales Performance Management, Marketing Automation, ABM, RevOps, Customer Data Platform, Revenue Intelligence, and Configure Price and Quote (CPQ) categories.
The analysis forecasts that the costs of arming front-line sales and service reps with the information, automation, and digital channel capabilities they need to compete are on a trajectory to exceed $10,000 as CFOs reallocate sales travel and real estate overhead to more scalable investments in technology and training. This will bring sales and service reps more in line with other highly automated job functions like warehouse, production, and finance workers.
“Every other business function from production, supply chain, finance and HR – has a system. The demand chain has been the exception,” says Stephen Diorio, the Managing Director of the Revenue Enablement Institute and co-author of the book, Revenue Operations: A New Way to Align Marketing and Sales, Monetize Data and Ignite Growth. “The fact that the market value of the 100 firms enabling the Revenue Operating System has grown to $1 Trillion reflects the value that can be created by a system for scalable and consistent growth.”