7 Key Takeaways From Gartner’s First-Ever Market Guide For Revenue Intelligence Platforms
Nov 30, 2021
Gartner, the leading analyst firm, in November, released its first-ever “Market Guide for Revenue Intelligence Platforms”. In this guide, Gartner describes how innovations such as AI predictive forecasting, activity intelligence, and conversational intelligence have created a Revenue Intelligence marketplace. Revenue Intelligence platforms can drive revenue growth, improve sales performance, and provide a single source of truth for revenue operations. Gartner also provides a market analysis with market direction as well as recommendations for buyers of revenue intelligence on how to evaluate such technologies to drive revenue growth in their organizations. The report covers core capabilities that combine together to provide the best selling experience to close deals faster. In the report, Gartner features key tech companies, including Aviso, as representative vendors in this market. In this blog post, we outline seven key takeaways that will further help you understand this dynamic market and evaluate how to find the right revenue intelligence platform for your needs.
Revenue intelligence is crossing the chasm fast to mirror the rise of RevOps as a strategic function: A few years ago only frontier and early adopter organizations were using revenue intelligence technologies, but it’s quickly spreading across the market landscape. Since the pandemic, revenue intelligence platforms have shown their value more broadly, and companies across different industries are now realizing how these technologies can help them drive growth despite macro uncertainty. The surge in revenue intelligence platforms has also benefited from the rising importance of revenue operations teams.
True revenue intelligence needs to apply AI across revenue cycle processes: Gartner notes that at a minimum, revenue intelligence solutions need to be able to understand and inspect pipeline, assess opportunity health and deal risk, gain intelligence across sales reps and teams’ activities, and provide deal coaching to reps, all within the same platform. Unlike in the past, when many “one trick” tools could simply do one thing in the revenue forecasting process (e.g. champion tracking), Gartner has elevated what customers should be demanding from any true revenue intelligence solution. It won’t be enough for players to provide limited capabilities and compete in this market.
The right architecture choice is essential to consolidate data sources in a world-class revenue intelligence solution: Gartner says revenue intelligence platforms should offer a flexible architecture that is extensible at the time to integrate with various data sources. Data is the lifeblood of most organizations, which is why businesses are increasingly turning to tools and technologies that help consolidate their data sources to generate true revenue intelligence. Even with increasingly sophisticated tools designed to pull data from multiple sources, companies are still forced to spend too much time gathering data from disparate sources. Hence, a flexible and CRM-agnostic architecture in a revenue intelligence platform is essential to consolidate all your data sources.
Future innovation will span more data sources, better analytic capabilities, and more human-friendly insight and action delivery methods: Gartner states a bold vision for a future where teams can automate their daily and weekly tasks such as sales forecasting, report building, and gaining deal insights, so they can get more time to focus on strategic revenue work. Additionally, Gartner describes how revenue intelligence platforms will compete on integrating capabilities such as conversational intelligence, embedded collaboration spaces, and data-driven storytelling to further expand the scope of impact for sales, marketing, customer success, and other customer-facing organizations.
It is crucial to enable sales reps through more productive user experiences and better coaching: Gartner describes the rise of AI-generated explanations, and voice assistants, as the new frontier for enabling sales reps virtually or in the field to glean insights from their revenue intelligence tools as well as drive key actions. Also, Gartner believes that managers should be able to use revenue intelligence solutions to coach their sales reps at a deal-by-deal and play-by-play level versus through more general approaches.
The future of dashboards is embedded analytics and data-driven stories: Gartner predicts that analytics platforms will shift from delivering static reports to using data storytelling. Sellers will be able to understand information more quickly and accurately through the use of data-driven stories. AI and ML will be used in dynamic storytelling to displace dashboards for frontline sales teams and managers. The burden will shift from sellers getting smarter about data, to making it easier for sellers to understand and act on data. More revenue intelligence vendors will bring interfaces through which sales teams can interact with embedded analytics signals.
The market will continue to consolidate in the coming years: Gartner forecasts the revenue intelligence market will continue to evolve fast and witness a consolidation of vendors in the future. According to Gartner, this market is still immature compared to other technologies, and vendors are suitable for mergers and acquisitions.
Also Read: Forrester Announces New Revenue Operations And Intelligence (RO&I) Category Featuring Aviso
The Gartner report covers five core capabilities for revenue intelligence. We’ll describe in this post how Aviso’s AI Guided revenue intelligence platform uniquely offers these capabilities to help enterprises succeed at scale:
Activity intelligence: Aviso’s Activity Intelligence allows automatic logging of contacts despite messy data. It supports automatic logging of all activities such as emails and meetings. Aviso monitors actual interactions to track the strengthening of relationships to provide Activity and Engagement Score. It includes analysis of email headers, calendars, as well as LinkedIn. Additionally, Aviso offers advanced visualization of deal relationship strength, identification of single-threaded deals and warm referrals, and Next Best Person connection recommendations.
Deal coaching: Aviso’s Coaching Rooms provide sales representatives and managers with the most up-to-date, relevant, and data-driven insights they need to create robust coaching plans, action items, and recommendations. Also, Aviso’s Sales Owner Scorecard helps sales managers compare the performance of their different teams and identify which team members need the most coaching (and at which stage). In addition, Aviso’s sentiment analysis supports various conversation channels and integrates with Zoom, Teams, etc., to help you understand the exact buyer intent during a call.
Opportunity health assessment: Aviso helps you maintain your pipeline health with periodic, objective health check-ups. Advanced analytics provide a data-driven assessment as opposed to CRM self-reports. Your sales teams can compare pipeline at the start of the quarter to new pipeline added to ending pipeline predictions and compare human and AI forecast predictions to determine the source of any discrepancies. Aviso highlights the deals that have a shot of being won early.
Deal risk insight: Aviso Deal Insights offer Opportunity Maps (or Deal Maps) with At-Risk and Upside deals and generates exact statistical probabilities to score every opportunity with a WinScore to help sales managers track deal behaviors. Aviso surfaces bundles of upside deals for sales managers to increase upside forecast potential and remove the risk of committed deals that are not solid anymore. Also, our conversational intelligence helps investigate what’s happening in virtual deal calls. We help you understand risks to deals and renewals early in the cycle.
Pipeline analytics: Aviso’s AI-based Pipeline Analytics helps your sales teams strengthen pipeline management at the right time. It enables you to inspect the pipeline of future quarters with advanced pipeline analytics. Since playing the long-term optimization game is key to sustained revenue, Aviso helps you see if you’re on track to creating a sufficient pipeline by taking a couple of quarters out. Aviso lets you find out if your pipeline is the optimal mix of opportunities that will gear your team for success. Aviso also offers segment-level information and lets you get a snapshot view of your sales data, forecasts, and transitions in the pipeline at a segment level. You can easily navigate and get a granular view of segments and how they affect the overall numbers.
Aviso’s AI Guidance Platform offers a comprehensive set of tools that drive revenue intelligence and guide your sales, marketing, and customer success teams. Think of Aviso as a self-driving revenue engine that augments your deals and pipeline intelligence by revealing hidden revenue opportunities from all customers. From pre-week pulse checks and mid-week nudges to end-of-the-week coaching and action plans, Aviso’s AI Guidance Platform helps all revenue players maximize their sales processes by recommending the right engagement time from beginning to end. With Aviso, businesses globally have transformed their revenue and sales processes. Our Value Estimation Calculator helps you understand the value your business could benefit from using Aviso AI Guidance Platform. Check out the Aviso Value Estimation Calculator today.
