Today, we’re delighted to announce the launch of Revenue Process Automation (RPA) platform. This is the result of years of collaboration with enterprise customers, and delivers a completely unmet need in the market place, which is enabling teams to instrument, analyze and automate their revenue processes at scale natively in Salesforce.
What is RPA?
The core idea behind RPA is an extremely obvious but powerful one — that if you could get ALL the communications data between your reps and customers, then analyze them together with your pipeline, you could automate virtually any process in your revenue organization.
Here are a handful of of use cases that can be automated with RPA…
Activity Management/Coaching – making sense of activity at scale
- Monitoring – compliance, script adherence
- Call Scoring – ensuring the right behaviors are being executed
- Data Entry – automating dispositions, extracting lead sources, identifying competitors
- Sentiment Analysis – detecting if/when customers are unhappy and related triggers
Deal Management – ensuring your process is followed on every opportunity
- Ensuring opportunities are in the appropriate stages and forecast categories
- Ensuring deal risks are identified and surfaced proactively
- Ensuring reps know what activities are expected of them according to your process
- Getting visibility into if or when people are deviating from the process, and its impact
Analytics – proactively identifying issues
- Calculating your win/loss curve (and changes thereof)
- Calculating your deal velocity (and changes thereof)
- Calculating your forecast accuracy (and changes thereof)
- Calculating your ACV (and changes thereof)
- Calculating your Pipeline coverage (and changes thereof)
So, why has nobody else done this yet?
The main reason for this is actually pretty simple.
Remember that the goal of RPA is to automate the revenue processes that your managers and leaders are doing every day.
These processes always follow the same pattern of 1) finding the relevant data across multiple systems >> 2) crunching the data (‘sales math’), 3) comparing the conclusion to a process and 4) performing a task
Here’s where today’s sales tech solutions consistently fall short…
1. Data Aggregation
When was the last time one of your managers was able to do their job by leveraging data in a single system? The answer is likely ‘never’.
The truth is that your managers use multiple systems of record every day to figure out ‘what really happened’.
Let’s say the manager is looking at an opportunity and sees no activity in Salesforce. They will likely jump into Gong.io to see if a meeting happened. Into Google Calendar to see if a meeting was ever scheduled. Into email to see if they missed any conversations. And then into Slack to just ask the rep ‘where are we on this?’
The reality is, that your data is scattered across many different systems and you’re likely relying on your managers (your most valuable and expensive resources) to use their hands/fingers/eyes/brain to manually stitch this data together time and time again, instead of focusing on higher value activities.
Without the ability to programmatically JOIN your data within a single system, automating your revenue process is simply impossible.
2. Data Computation
If there’s one thing Managers, RevOps and Sales Leaders are good at, it’s sales math.
They have years of experience under their belt that helps them evaluate the state, risk and potential of an opportunity just by looking at the data.
Questions like…
- When was the last time we had a truly ‘engaged’ interaction with the customer?
- Has there been a deviation in our conversation cadence (have we gone warm, cold or same?)
- How long have we been in this stage?
- How much effort have we put into the deal so far?
- Are we talking to the right seniority?
- Does the data that the rep put in pass the sniff test?
The best sales managers are able to look at the data and interpret all of these signals from raw data, without thinking about it.
And unfortunately, there is likely no single report within your stack that can answer all these questions at once.
3. Rules-Based Assessment
Once managers have a handle on WHAT is happening, they map the situation to the process.
- Has this opportunity been open too long?
- Have we chased this down enough?
- Is this opportunity in the right stage?
- Is this an outlier or consistent with the reps’s cadence.
Today, there is no system that exists of defining a very specific sales process and comparing your pipeline against it.
4. Task Execution
Based on the analysis and the process comparison, the manager now makes a call on what to do next.
This is almost always in the form of a CRM update (change the stage), and email update or a next step task being assigned to the rep.
And because we do not have the underlying data analysis systems available, this last (and most valuable) step is simply not possible.
Enter Revenue Process Automation.
Our RPA solution solves all of these problems in four easy steps.
First, it makes sure that you have a single system of record that has ALL the data that your managers/leaders use when executing coaching, deal management and forecasting tasks. Our innovative approach ensures that Salesforce can be this system of record without scaling issues.
Second, it quantifies all of the signals that your managers compute in their heads, and makes them available as metrics for you in standard Salesforce reports.
Third, it allows you to define a highly customized sales process in terms of what you expect from your reps:
- What data you expect to see in CRM
- What the requirements are for each stage
- What the expectations are in terms of how hard they chase/qualify each opportunity
- How all of these rules change across different segments (SMB, mid-market, enterprise)
And then, it lets you compare all of our metrics in Step 2 against these processes.
Fourth, it allows you to automate all of the tasks that a manager does without writing any code.
How does the product work?
The product is composed of two highly modular components.
The first is a cloud communication platform that captures, structures, analyzes and pushes all of your activity data to Salesforce (calls, texts, MMS, web meetings, email)
The second is a Salesforce package that ingests all of your activity/opportunity data, generates metrics for your entire funnel and allows you to execute rules based automations.
Because our architecture treats Salesforce as the system of record, it can be deployed piecemeal or entirely at once as a single solution. No matter what problem you are trying to solve (getting better data, analyzing it or building automations), our products enable you to solve it in the lowest friction way possible.
Want to learn more?
Schedule a risk-free consultation with one of our product consultants today!
