As economic pressures continue to change the way companies buy and sell, Oracle Fusion Sales is focusing on innovations that will help business leaders adapt.
Business buyers are bringing their personal expectations to work. As Rob Tarkoff expressed recently, customers increasingly value outcomes over ownership. They’re looking for value-based pricing models, and they expect convenience throughout the experience of ordering, re-ordering, expanding, paying and managing their purchases. As such, many companies – especially in the high tech and industrial manufacturing industries – are pivoting to recurring revenue models to meet these expectations. And companies across all industries are doubling down on improving margins, which means rethinking everything that impacts their cost of revenue generation. How? Sell more to existing customers, which requires a deeper understanding of those customers than most sellers have access to today.
Let’s break this down into three key things revenue leaders should be thinking about over the next year, and how Oracle Fusion Sales, as part of the Oracle CX Platform, will help you achieve your goals.
1. Meet customer demand for flexible business models
Customers expect total convenience in where and how they buy. As buyer preferences continue to evolve, businesses are transitioning from single-sale models of the past to a more agile collection of business models, recurring revenue streams, product and service bundles, and competitive pricing strategies.
Making this evolution in strategy is a massive undertaking for most organizations because they are not prepared with the systems, data and resources that can drive dynamic, multi-channel buying behaviors. Legacy systems or point solutions will struggle with things like usage-based billing, or even just adding hardware and services onto the same quote. The enterprise software market is crowded with add-ons and point solutions that attempt to address this complex landscape, leaving the organization with the expensive and complex task of integrating things together, transforming data, and enhancing simplistic models to map to real-world use cases.
Oracle’s strategy is unique in that we are engineering solutions that cover end-to-end business flows throughout the entire revenue generation process. Our Revenue Transformation initiative, one of our key areas of focus, is designed to address all the complexity inherent in pivoting to more flexible revenue models by leveraging the power of the Oracle Fusion Sales portfolio along with key functionality in ERP, Supply Chain and Order Management.
Fusion Sales is a modular suite of applications built on a modern technical and operational platform alongside crucial, connected business applications that power finance, supply chain, order management, etc. These solutions are engineered to work together but architected to allow for modular adoption into any business application landscape, giving businesses the ideal runway to initiate a revenue transformation journey that fits their needs and goals over time.
2. Revitalize buyer and seller experiences
Remaining competitive sometimes means completely rewriting the rules of the business, which is exactly what our Revenue Transformation solutions achieve – changing the nature of how you do business. Direct sales staff should be able to operate with specific rules and pricing based on factors like geography or account agreements, while channel partners may have added dimensions that influence their experience. The buyer’s self-service experience must include precisely the right elements to add value and streamline the process. The omni-channel approach isn’t about enabling the same experience across self-service, seller and partner channels. It is about leveraging the opportunities each channel offers in strategic ways.
Oracle CPQ, Subscription Management and Commerce work together and will continue to evolve to drive this type of omni-channel revenue transformation.
The seller experience must also evolve, with the role of the CRM being carefully re-examined to ensure that it’s being treated as the powerful execution tool it should be instead of the data entry and reporting tool it was in the past. Oracle Fusion Sales is investing heavily in Sales Orchestration and Intelligence capabilities that move sellers through best practice sales methodologies, automate manual work and deliver AI-based recommendations to surface more opportunities and accelerate deal velocity.
3. Prioritize pathways to better margins
While Sales Orchestration and Intelligence capabilities are designed to increase win rates and deal sizes, seller efficiency is also a huge benefit. When sellers are precision-focused and empowered with key information, the cost of each sale is greatly reduced.
But another key area of focus for revenue leaders in the current economic climate is prioritizing lower-cost revenue growth by selling more effectively into the existing customer base. This requires a new approach to first-party selling, and a foundation of deep customer data that goes far beyond “customer 360” mashups. To have successful expansion and repeat business, sellers need to know what a customer has purchased, what they paid, what discounts they received, what they’re using or not using. Sellers need a 360° view that spans both front and back office data. Oracle Fusion Sales will continue to enhance this complete 360° view to provide more information and insights to sellers throughout the sales cycle, like invoice and subscription details, visual and dynamic account hierarchies, and contact relationship maps.
Tackling all of these key priorities is a huge job and it requires business leaders to move beyond the old approach of identifying a problem and buying a new tool to address it. Oracle CX is designed to facilitate the alignment, insight and structure revenue leaders need in order to grow profitably.
You have an opportunity to do more with less – less fragmented technology and less data complexity. The Oracle Fusion Sales product team are looking forward to partnering with you to flourish as we bring our vision to life in 2023 and beyond.