Revenue Cycle Management

Why Companies Need Revenue Cycle Management

Generating revenue is the lifeblood of any business. Today, sales is viewed as the revenue creator and marketing is considered to be a cost center, and not fundamental to the revenue creation process at all. This traditional model has resulted in inefficiencies at every step of the revenue cycle and prevents companies from achieving maximum revenue potential.

However, several key trends, including the Internet and e-commerce, Google and other online advertising channels, emerging social media networks, and a new focus on measurement and accountability in marketing, are creating the opportunity for organizations to rethink how they create revenue. In this new model companies transform they way that their marketing and sales teams work by:

• Identifying and managing the marketing department as a true revenue-generating organization;
• Adopting a perspective that revenue creation starts when a company first meets a prospective buyer, whether through online or offline channels, and from deal close to continuous customer loyalty;
• Implementing a systematic process of nurturing prospective buyers forward through the revenue cycle, and measuring buyer engagement at every step of the process;
• Providing sales teams with the information and tools they need to prioritize their time so that they can engage with the most qualified prospective buyers, at exactly the moment each buyer is ready to act;
• Measuring the effectiveness and return-on-investment of spending on people and programs at every step of the revenue cycle across marketing and sales; and
• Using these facts about effectiveness and ROI to allocate investments to accelerate and optimize results and to achieve unprecedented visibility and predictability into closed revenue.

In order to achieve this kind of transformation, companies must address organization, compensation and incentives, job roles, work practices, and other non-technology factors. However, this business process transformation also requires the use of a new kind of software solution to support the creation, management, measurement, analysis, and optimization of an end-to-end revenue cycle spanning marketing and sales. Traditional approaches have been tuned to serve the separate needs of marketing or sales, creating silos of information and process which work against a continuous revenue cycle; have been too focused on accounting for the details of buyer contact names and deal values without providing an over-arching framework for measurement, forecasting, and continuous optimization of revenue results; and have been too hard to implement and use at scale to achieve ubiquitous adoption and usage by all stakeholders along the revenue cycle, including Marketing professionals, the CMO, sales representatives, sales management, the CFO, and the CEO.

Marketo’s vision is to enable this business transformation by helping companies move from traditional marketing automation to adopting a revenue cycle management methodology that accelerates revenue and changes how marketing and sales work and work together.