Meet Revenue Lifecycle Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the challenges in managing revenue efficiency.
- List the expectations from a modern revenue management solution.
- Describe Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) and its salient features.
The Revenue Generation Lifecycle
The sales lifecycle starts with lead generation, where the sales team identifies a potential customer. The team then creates an opportunity to track this customer, also called a lead. Next, a sales rep gathers customer requirements and creates a quote based on the requirements. Then, they add the pricing with discounts and promotions. After the customer approves the quote, the sales rep creates a contract and all the stakeholders validate and sign it. Next, the team generates an order and the fulfillment team initiates order fulfillment. Finally, it’s time for billing. The customer receives an invoice and pays for the products and services. With the payment, the company gets closer to its quarterly revenue target.
Sounds like a well-oiled process. What possibly could go wrong?
Revenue Lifecycle Challenges
Many organizations have historically used point solutions to support different aspects of their sales journey. Point solutions are custom applications developed for a particular use case. Such point solutions satisfy the immediate need for a particular use case, but present several challenges as well.
- Operational challenges such as pricing and contract approval delays, inaccurate order capture, and revenue leakage due to incorrect invoicing.
- Lack of comprehensive support for recurring business scenarios such as renewals, proration, product bundling, and contract amendments.
- Inability to scale to meet increased complexities, such as multiproduct quotes and orders.
- High operational costs due to integration of disparate tools that don’t work well together.
- Inability to provide composable services that aid plug and play with other services.
The cumulative impact of these challenges hinders the seamless sales experience.
Meet Jose Figueroa, the chief revenue officer at Cloud Kicks—manufacturer of personalized, stylish, and comfortable custom sneakers for celebrities and professional athletes.
Jose understands that his team faces challenges and recognizes the need for a complete revenue management solution that improves the sales workflow. He also knows that the chief financial officer is keen to ensure that:
- Orders are accurate and all the invoicing requirements are captured.
- Accurate sales data is captured so that it can be sent to the customers’ financial systems.
The Search for a Modern Revenue Management Solution
A complete revenue management solution empowers organizations to effectively manage customer interactions from initial engagement to after-sales support and revenue generation.
Jose is looking for a solution that provides a unified customer experience and seamless processes to support all of the following stages of the sales cycle.
- Manage the product catalog.
- Define product pricing.
- Configure product workflows.
- Create quotes and capture orders.
- Manage asset lifecycle.
- Manage contracts.
- Implement order-to-cash workflow.
- Generate revenue lifecycle intelligence.
Keeping growth in mind, a revenue management solution must scale to support a larger number of transactions and bigger quotes. Also, as the organization enhances its portfolio, the solution must support new business models such as subscriptions and usage-based models, renewals, and amendments. Support for process automation, industry-specific integrations, and compliance factors are also important considerations.
A Unique Value Proposition
Revenue Lifecycle Management (RLM) is a unified product-to-cash suite for omni-channel buying and selling. The suite is built to support business expansion needs, and provide automation and revenue intelligence capabilities. Built as an extensible platform, RLM provides composable APIs so that other cloud services can utilize its functionality.
Here’s a detailed look at RLM capabilities.
Now that you’re familiar with Revenue Lifecycle Management, explore it in more detail in the next unit.