Blind spots block growth. Outreach gives you full visibility into what’s happening in your entire pipeline so you can coach better, forecast accurately, and close quicker. Streamline your revenue ops.
Revenue orchestration is one of many buzzy sales terms right now, and for some B2B companies, the tactic has proven successful.
As a selling strategy, it aligns internal sales, marketing, customer success, and other go-to-market teams to generate leads and acquire customers through shared technology, marketing, data collection, and communication.
For several years now, sales engagement platform Salesloft and product demo platform Reprise have used revenue orchestration in their lead generation. The B2B executives stated that it has helped streamline efforts and increase win rates, as generating revenue now takes more than just closing deals.
“Revenue has become a little bit more complex over the past 10 years or so where it used to be just sales,” said Mark Niemiec, chief revenue officer of Salesloft. “As we move more into subscription-oriented businesses, revenue is about more than just sales. It’s about renewals and the complete customer life cycle.”
Working together
As revenue generation is an integral part of any go-to-market employee’s role, revenue orchestration offers a streamlined way for teams to work together, according to Chris Mabry, vice president of solutions and partnerships at Reprise.
“Outbound sales or go-to-market has fundamentally shifted,” he said. “I see an entire orchestration of revenue collection and retaining of revenue that goes well beyond the responsibility of a normal seller being basically the course for business today. It takes a team, and it’s messier and muddier than it ever was. To me, what revenue orchestration means is essentially that—it takes many facets of an organization to meet the new buyer where they are and to retain them.”
For Mabry, revenue orchestration is at the forefront of his go-to-market selling strategy.
“What I’ve done is I've designed my team to be comped and measured upon [pipeline] conversions and on retention of customers,” he said. “This is a really different approach than a normal technical sales team is measured on. The actual incentive of my team is to generate pipelines…They’re partnered with the whole go-to-market engine. They’re there to convert those customers once they get them in the door, and they’re converting them in a really thoughtful way because they’re also trying to retain them at the same time.”
Changing customer behavior
Niemiec and Mabry stated that customer behavior has changed over the last few years as more information has become available, which has subsequently made prospects more educated in the buying process.
According to both executives, revenue orchestration allows go-to-market teams to understand where prospects are and how to sell to them.
“How do we fill at the top of the funnel? Where should we be focusing our time? How do we qualify opportunities? How do we move them through the funnel with speed and velocity?” Niemiec said. “That has changed a lot because we used to think about that funnel as a logical, linear progression. What we’re finding, because there’s so many more folks involved in the buying process, is that they all enter and exit the buying process at different rates, at different times.”
Best practices
Both processes and the right tech stack are essential for successful revenue orchestration.
“Where we see customers being most successful is where they have really thoughtful processes,” Niemiec said. “That process includes: What are all the systems that need to be connected into a platform like Salesloft? What are all the third-party systems I need to get signals from? How should those signals be adjudicated and displaced by the salesperson? What’s marketing’s role in that process? How do we make sure that we’re giving the customer or the prospect a good and elegant experience? It’s all related to how the process is designed.”