Revenue Operations & Intelligence for Pharma, Software and Finserv
By Brian Hirt
Jan 03, 2023
Table of Contents
In this post, learn about four strategic use cases powered by revenue operations and intelligence software. We will specifically discuss how these targeted actions drive better sales execution, visibility and revenue growth in the pharmaceutical, software and financial services industries.
Applying Revenue Operations & Intelligence to Pinpoint Actual Versus Expected Behavior at Scale
Revenue operations and intelligence solutions come with a straightforward value proposition – they turn your data into actionable insights to help you sell more products and services to more customers across any channel.
But what if you don’t make or distribute traditional widgets, or there is a gap between the date of sale and the revenue-generating use of your products or services? How can these revenue operations and intelligence principles be applied to the quandary of identifying “Actual versus Expected” customer behavior in a timely manner to reverse negative trends?
We’ve covered extensively in this space the AI-driven customer insights derived from Zilliant Sales IQ™ and made actionable by Zilliant Campaign Manager™.
Let’s look now at how a subset of these out-of-the-box action types can optimize sales performance in three industries that deal in non-tangible or consumption-based product portfolios. Before we dive into the four action types, below are a few examples of these industry use cases.
Pharma
A pharmaceutical sales rep wins a contract with a hospital system to provide some expected amount of a drug to be shipped to the hospital’s pharmacy, where it can then be prescribed to patients. The pharmaceutical company either sends periodic invoices for the actual amount prescribed to patients or the hospital places orders as needed against a long-term contract it negotiated. Either way, there is an expected perpetual value to this relationship. However, the hospital slows its orders and eventually stops buying altogether. It’s not because patients stopped needing the drug. It’s because the customer began buying it from a competitor, but the early signs of customer churn were not detected.
Software
A SaaS company offers a cloud-based platform that each of its ten product offerings are built upon. The company’s flagship product has lost market share in the past five years. Customer defections in the year prior to the pandemic make up a lion’s share of the five-year revenue downturn. Other priorities during a time of crisis overshadowed win-back efforts. The company now recognizes it needs a targeted campaign to reach back out to former customers.
Meanwhile, a large software provider has a highly matrixed organization as a result of numerous acquisitions. The company lacks a singular view of each customer, which means at any given time it might have four or five sales reps calling on the same customer without coordination. Each individual rep is focused on selling one piece of the product portfolio. Inevitably, money is left on the table as the opportunity for a higher-level solution sale is missed. The company needs to simplify its disjointed selling process in order to grow wallet share; it needs intelligent guidance to cohesively pitch the right products to the right customers.
Financial Services
A B2B financial services provider sells lines of credit to companies in the form of corporate purchasing cards. For example, it secures a deal with a construction company to provide the builder’s contractors and job site project managers with credit cards to be used for project-related expenses. Contractors can run to The Home Depot or Lowe’s to replenish materials as needed. The financial services company only makes money when the card is actually used and they have a target in mind for how much the construction company will spend on its cards per month. But it lacks an efficient means of analyzing actual purchasing data to address negative trends in a timely manner.
Data Must Be Unlocked
To turn any of these scenarios into consistently winning campaigns, organizations must better leverage their data. With so much pressure to grow, there is more attention paid to finding and closing new deals than there is to current or former customer health. Your sales team is focused on getting the big hospital contract, or signing up the next card user, or pushing the newest product in your SaaS portfolio. Most companies are not investing the time and resources into actively monitoring contracted commitments, peer customer trends, historical buying trends, or recent signs of defection. An overreliance on manual tools further blocks the potential to grow organically.
4 Ways to Turn Data into Dollars
The prescriptions that follow are not new business ideas. They are things that everyone across each of these industries is looking to accomplish. What revenue operations and intelligence tools do is accelerate the identification, execution and success of these critical sales motions by putting actionable, account-specific and bite-sized insights into each seller’s queue.
With Sales IQ™, your in-house data becomes an opportunity generator, in the form of the following targeted actions that apply to each of the three industries we’ve outlined:
Recovery
Our AI engine analyzes relative spend across multiple products or services over recent weeks or months. It helps the financial services company compare its contractor customer’s actual transactions against expected behavior and highlight downward trends to act upon. Sales IQ™ can analyze the company’s wealth of real-time transaction data across hundreds or thousands of corporate buying accounts. It then alerts sales teams when card use drops off over a given time period. This early indicator of customer churn helps prevent customer defection before it’s too late.
Growth
Sales IQ™ compares like companies to create peer group profiles, identifying products that customers should be buying but aren’t. For the large software provider, the engine delivers revenue growth opportunities in the form of cross-sell actions – based on the profile of an ideal customer - for every existing account.
Win-Back
The software company that saw its flagship product lose customers prior to the pandemic can use Sales IQ™ to apply data science to a strategic win-back campaign. The engine looks at multiple prior years of data to flag customers who purchased a product years ago but are no longer buying.
Contract Compliance
The pharma company deals in long-term customer-specific contracts. Each large hospital contract comes with pre-negotiated pricing, so placing an order is seamless. When the hospital needs more of a drug, it places an order under the contract with little sales team involvement. The insidious factor here is that the customer likely negotiated special pricing based on a commitment to order a specific volume over a set time period, but in most cases the pharma team is not actively monitoring the run rate. Sales IQ™ looks at expected contracted volume by analyzing the run rate to measure whether the hospital is on track to meet its commitments. This helps to more accurately tag value to each customer contract and hold the customer accountable to it.
Read more: How to Keep B2B Contracts & Agreements Profitable & Compliant
The Game-Changer: Turning Insight into Action
With Zilliant, companies can easily tailor targeted campaigns by:
Scoping by customer and/or product Filtering out seasonality-related buying patterns Setting a minimum or maximum for actual versus expected discrepancies Defining thresholds based on any custom criteria Limiting the number of actions per customer or per salesperson
The resulting campaigns put highly winnable growth, recovery, win-back, and contract compliance actions into the hands of sales reps in an easily digestible format. A closed-loop system and campaign analytics allow sales operations teams to consistently improve campaigns, refine business strategies, and hold sellers accountable.
Rather than delivering these insights via cumbersome spreadsheets attached in an email and asking the sales team to analyze and derive insights, empower them with tailored, account-specific actions. With revenue optimization and management software, sales reps can stop analyzing and get back to what they do best: selling.
Ready to grow revenue? Zilliant Quick Start for Revenue Operations & Intelligence can be deployed in as few as three weeks!
