Turning growth into a repeatable process, at scale—achieving this is the ultimate goal for most every chief revenue officer and chief executive officer on the planet. Operationalizing growth is the north star that leads to long term success, but in the past, this has been difficult to pull off.
What if a company could operate in a way that enables every accountable revenue employee to know exactly what they need to do, when they need to do it? What if those same revenue employees, across sales, marketing, customer success, and finance, could accurately predict the future of what will happen in their area of the revenue process?
Growth would be transformed from a goal to a repeatable, scalable process, driving enormous levels of shareholder value.
I recently shared my thoughts on the revenue operations movement and the mindset that makes this possible. I mentioned how technology, specifically our revenue operations platform, has helped our customers achieve this predictability at scale.
Today, I’m excited to talk about the people actually driving this progress in their companies and across the world. They are the stewards of a new class of thinking. They are visionaries who believe revenue is not merely an outcome, but a process that can be streamlined and automated. They believe you can operationalize growth at scale.
They are Generation Revenue (GenR).
Generation Revenue Is Here
I’ve been in sales all my life. My first job was as an SDR. As CEO of Clari, I talk to CEOs, board members, hedge fund managers, investment bankers, financial analysts, executive staff—all people who care deeply, and think about, revenue.
Recently, I’ve noticed a trend: Revenue leaders and teams embracing a mindset of transparency and accountability, breaking down silos and guarding against the bring-your-own-report mentality.
These revenue leaders believe that revenue is a process and should be run like one. They value predictability as essential, not just aspirational. They’re defining themselves not just by the number, but by the legacy they leave behind.
They’re building high performing teams, valuing inclusivity and diversity, and leading with empathetic accountability.
Something big is happening. The Generation Revenue(GenR) movement is here.
On May 11-12, we’re bringing together leaders who exemplify these ideals for our virtual Generation Revenue conference.
The event is dedicated to learning—through sharing best practices, brainstorming new ideas and innovations, and networking with new colleagues. The GenR mission is to exponentially expand the collective knowledge of revenue operations, driving value for you, value for your team, value for the entire RevOps community.
How Did We Get Here?
The concept of Generation Revenue is nothing new. Revenue teams have always sought ways to work better together, driving predictability and scalability as the company grows.
But anyone in the job knows it’s tough. It’s hard to see where you stand. Disconnected data and stale spreadsheets make it difficult to get aligned on the next best steps for any one seller, let alone an entire team.
Some large organizations with ambitious IT and strategy teams would try to do this themselves, stitching together a custom dashboard, data warehouse, and visualization tools on top of their CRM. The problem: It’s typically fragile, expensive, and provides limited access to just a few employees.
This doesn’t help them operationalize their strategy from the boardroom to the frontline.
Yet the revenue leaders who believed in transparency and accountability across every corner of the business never lost hope. They persisted.
Then the pandemic hit, and everyone was catapulted into a new norm. Events of the past year have accelerated this transformation. Just as adversity focuses the mind, the challenges we’ve all faced this year have forced us to grow as leaders, and as organizations.
Before the year was out, Boston Consulting Group detailed how fundamentally our business world had changed. We pivoted online and onto video. We focused on our home offices instead of dinners out. We tracked our days with performance software. And overwhelmingly, BCG found, productivity soared. White collar workers have little desire to return to business as it was pre-2020. Another BCG study found that just a few months after the pandemic shutdowns began, remote and virtual working was embraced as a new norm, and traditional offices and office commutes as we knew it had begun fading into the past.
All of this radical rethinking of how we do business is a result of our roller coaster of a year, but it’s more than that. In many ways, I see this as an acceleration of trends already put in motion by our increasingly digitized age, and by the rising digital native generation.
The Future We’re Betting On
Just as antiquated spreadsheets won’t cut it anymore, neither does outdated forecasting that falls too far from the pin. Firms that don’t invest heavily in data and analytics powered by artificial intelligence will lose any competitive edge, and ultimately fall by the wayside.
Generation Revenue knows this. It’s the future they’re betting on—and the future is here.
As we launch the Generation Revenue conference, I’m honored and so thrilled to welcome so many leaders, and future leaders, of the revenue movement.
Yes, we’ll feature CEOs and business heroes everyone knows, inside and outside of the sales universe. But what I’m most looking forward to is connecting with and hearing from the front line managers, the revenue operators, the CROs, and their teams.
The future of revenue is here, and I can’t wait to see what it brings.
Read more:
Bringing Revenue Operations to Every Business
Why Revenue Operations? Why Now?
The Future of Forecasting and the Next Generation of Revenue Management