Stephen Hurrell's Analyst Perspectives

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Subscription Management is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect the real-world criteria incorporated in a request for proposal to Office of Revenue vendors supporting the spectrum of subscription management. Using this methodology, we evaluated vendor submissions in seven categories: five relevant to the product experience ﹘ Adaptability, Capability, Manageability, Reliability and Usability ﹘ and two related to the customer experience ﹘ TCO/ROI and vendor Validation.

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Subscription Management, I want to share some of my observations about an important component of subscription management: Contract management. 

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Subscription Management, I want to share some of my observations about how the market is evolving. The era of subscriptions has transformed the way businesses operate and consumers engage with services across every industry. Organizations are increasingly adopting a digital approach to selling goods and services, wherein customers have the option to purchase through periodic subscription pricing or based on consumption, rather than traditional one-time ownership. Add to this an increasing desire for customers to purchase when, how and where they want, whether via digital commerce, self-service portals by and by voice and text and the landscape looks very different from even just five years ago. 

Conga is part of our Office of Revenue market coverage and I recently attended the 2023 Conga Connect conference held in Orlando during April of 2023. The conference was the public reveal of a new Conga, with significant announcements in three main areas. First was the overall positioning within a self-designated category of revenue life cycle management. Secondly was the first public revealing of a new Conga platform. And finally, announcements of new partnerships were headlined by a significant relationship with Accenture.

I have been involved with customer relationship management for over 15 years, and although that is not as long as the category has been around, it does coincide with an era where companies and commentators are calling into question the application’s effectiveness. To counter this perception, both CRM vendors and complementary third-party “add-ons” have developed new functionality that aims to improve the “R” in CRM, especially as it relates to sales engagement. But much of this additional functionality is dependent on the quality of the original base data – whether it’s facts about a customer, prospect of products or, if not more important, when, how and what activities were performed in furtherance of this relationship.

Configure, price and quote (CPQ) software has been traditionally viewed as a specialist outpost of software, almost exclusively B2B and predominately used in manufacturing or specialty chemicals or other industries where there were large variants of similar products that required careful configuration, pricing and ultimately generating a quote that could be forwarded to a prospective customer for consideration. But in recent years, this has changed, both in the number of vendors offering CPQ products, either standalone or more commonly as part of a broader offering, and the number of selling organizations recognizing the value of either the “C,” the “P,” or the “Q” or some combination of these.

Ventana Research recently announced its 2023 research agenda for the Office of Revenue, continuing the guidance we’ve offered for nearly two decades to help organizations realize their optimal value from applying technology to improve business outcomes. Chief Sales and Revenue Officers face an imperative to manage their sales and revenue organizations, but they don’t always have the guidance they need to embrace technology to achieve the best possible outcomes. As we look forward to 2023, we are focusing on the entire selling and buying journey, and in addition focusing on those activities that ensure renewal and expansion as well as newer digital engagement and selling channels. We are looking at applications that simplify processes and tasks across the customer experience, from beginning to end.

Those of us who have worked in or alongside sales teams have observed that many sales fundamentals have changed over the years. Yet, in many ways, they have not. One essential that has not changed is sales enablement. How do you onboard salespeople and quickly bring them up to speed? Or, how do you introduce new products and services so the sales team is conversant and knowledgeable about them? In years past, this would have happened at the head office or a regional office, with videos and internally produced documentation and product fact sheets. But thanks to the internet, this has all changed. Digitization has improved – and will continue to enhance – sales enablement.

The idea of partnerships in business is most definitely not new. Wholesaling through distributors and retailers is centuries old. For some industries, their entire model is selling and servicing through partners. Think auto parts, and the auto part stores visible in most neighborhoods. But what is new is that partnerships are moving beyond this reseller model towards product partnerships, where a seller’s products and services are supplemented by other vendors’ offerings from adjacent and complementary markets.

The topic of revenue operations has been extensively covered recently, not least by vendors extolling the virtues of their particular offering. But as with much of the software industry, vendors often see the market through the lens of their current product capabilities rather than what is necessarily needed. With the rise of the mixed-revenue model that includes subscription and usage pricing as well as one-time sales, combined with the growth in self-service commerce, the result is more teams within an organization being directly involved with supporting revenue generation. In response, many organizations have appointed a Chief Revenue Officer (CRO) who is responsible and accountable for all sources of revenue for an organization. And with the rise of the role of the CRO, combined with an increasing adoption of mixed-revenue models, we see this as an increasingly necessary shift. We believe that leadership will need to drive this change in approach, recognizing that this will require a shift in responsibilities and, as importantly, accountability.