Revenue Operations

What is Revenue Execution? Everything You Need to Know

Candice Coots

Content Marketing at SetSail

Table of contents:

The Importance of Revenue Execution

Let's face it. We are entering a new age of sales. On one hand, our customers are a click away from buying a competitor's product, giving us little control over how they buy. On the other hand, with all the customer interactions digitally captured we have a real opportunity to close the biggest gap in sales: the Revenue Execution gap.

What is the Revenue Execution gap? We have more intelligence than ever - brought to us by digital and AI. Forecasting is a household term in established sales teams, pipeline reviews are more granular than ever, and sales activity tracking is at its prime. But what no one talks about is how much of this actually changes your sales team's behaviors and habits.

An average sales rep today uses at least 6 tools to carry out their conversations with their customers. Their emails, meetings, virtual calls, and customer responses are all being recorded. This supposedly gives you the anatomy of a successful B2B deal, right? It doesn't. Something is missing from your formula of sales success.

What is Revenue Execution?

Revenue Execution is all about showing customer-facing reps the statistically proven ways to win, but not stopping at that. It's also about incentivizing them with a new third bucket of compensation, in addition to base and commission, to deliver sales excellence.

Recent advances in AI have made it possible to use machine learning to focus sellers on the small wins that truly matter. However, much of that data, no matter how precise, has been lacking in action. With Revenue Execution, rewarding those data-backed wins changes the game. It creates a new way of operating sales - from data to behaviors.

The data science behind small wins and its direct connection to the reward system (behavioral science) is what makes all the difference in this new model.

From data to signals to behaviors - Revenue Execution realigns your entire revenue teams - sales, marketing, and service around the customer. It shows them how to be excellent through small wins and rewards them for that excellence.

The Challenge of Siloed Sales Data

Each revenue team is comprised of SDRs, AEs, CSMs, Marketers, and sales leaders taking billions of micro-steps each day to close deals. Starting with CRM, each one of them uses a multitude of tools to prospect and nurture relationships with the customer.

However, there isn't a single 'lake' of data where all of this is being unified and enriched. Today, your entire sales data universe is a web of APIs, duplicate interactions, and oftentimes worse - missing interactions. Sometimes you even kindly encourage your reps to manually enter the number of interactions. We've all been guilty of that.

Without a consistent, reliable, and automated way of unifying that data (once and for all) Sales leaders will be stuck in this endless loop of chasing good data.

How does Revenue Execution solve it? It starts with a systematic, automated approach to unifying and enriching all sales data.

How Revenue Execution Does it: Unify and Enrich Sales Data

SetSail's Revenue Execution platform automatically captures emails, calls, and conversations and maps them back to your CRM. All of them.

The Challenge of Understanding What Drives Deals

Even when you’re collecting the right data, most sales dashboards drive no action. Reps are clear on their goals, but they’re unclear about exactly what they need to do to reach them. Most teams struggle with a lack of actionable data, including ways to measure and visualize data in real time. Luckily, new prescriptive tools are emerging that guide sales teams to the next best action. Any revenue teams not adapting to this shift will be left in the dust.

Sales Leaders know the value of business analytics and insights. However, most analytics, reports and dashboards are owned and managed by IT who may be unwilling or lacking bandwidth to evolve what you need into actionable information.

The solution? Utilize machine learning to discover the sales signals that lead to winning deals.

How Revenue Execution Does it: Discover Signals that Lead to Wins

Most sales dashboards drive no action. SetSail’s accurate AI drives micro-accelerations by showing you only the signals that close deals.

The Challenge of Limited Sales Management Bandwidth

Sales leaders are faced with an overwhelm of responsibility from gathering analytics and insights, onboarding and training new reps, ongoing coaching, building and maintaining incentivization programs, reporting on progress towards goals and so on.

Many sales leaders struggle with data overload and maneuvering through vast amounts of data. It can be difficult to identify what’s valuable and actionable towards driving revenue. Determining which actions and incentives are successful and surfacing challenges in rep performance can be an overwhelming task for an individual.

The solution to sales management? Utilize machine learning to transform what it means to coach your sales team.

How Revenue Execution Does it: Scale Sales Coaching

Your sales managers need help. With SetSail, you can set and forget the best practices you want to enforce and give complete visibility to your managers.

The Challenge of Turning Data into Action

Incentive management is an integral part of any successful and motivated sales team. Sales leaders end up wondering if they’re getting any real return. Most companies have significant opportunities to improve incentives, create effective sales development programs while driving real growth, reducing spend and enhancing overall team satisfaction.

However, doing so is not easy. Most companies lack dedicated resources for conducting the analysis required to identify areas that are a drag on incentive return on investment.

The solution? Motivate winning behaviors with smart micro-incentives.

How Revenue Execution Does it: Incentivize Top Rep Behaviors

Sales runs on rewards. Motivate sales reps instantaneously with micro-incentives that ensure focus on the right things and increase win rates by a LOT. Make it happen with SetSail.

Transforming Sales with Revenue Execution

SetSail is pioneering Revenue Execution for modern sales teams. The platform allows you to motivate winning behaviors with smart micro-incentives. Track the leading indicators of success and improve win rates at any stage.

Who should drive Revenue Execution

RevOps and Sales Ops

RevOps leaders need to be able to automate sales data and have a strong sales data foundation, empower sales team with the right tools that drive action.

Sales Managers, VPs, and Directors

Sales Leaders need a deep understanding of how their sales team is performing, who is falling behind, and who needs help. They can manage through leading indicators and not lagging ones.