Analyst Perspectives

While I do not have an MBA, I have a very academic degree in economics and three decades of experience in different facets of business. Why is this important or relevant? Well, an entire industry has sprung up to promote the latest business ideas, the adoption of which will, supposedly, if not guarantee success, improve the probability of success in any endeavor. And while some of these ideas...

A lot has changed in business over the past ten years. The rise of e-commerce and omnichannel buying and engagement, the increasing digitization of the economy and the broader adoption of pricing and revenue models such as subscription and usage. And these are all having an impact on how business leaders need to think about their organizations.

PROS has been in business since 1985, but over the past 10 years, the company has transformed itself from being primarily a vendor of on-premises price optimization software supporting the airline industry to providing a cloud-based set of applications that use data and artificial intelligence (AI) to aid in price determination. PROS also offers a scalable configure, price, quote (CPQ)...

While many vendors have focused on developing new technologies and features to improve sales execution through more personalized and targeted sales enablement, lead and sales opportunity progress tracking and scoring, manager coaching and conversational intelligence, it seems that sales and revenue teams are realizing that this is not, in and of itself, enough to arrest the decline in quota...

I wrote last year about how interest in pricing management is now expanding from the traditional use cases in industries such as manufacturing and chemicals. In part, this has been helped by technology changes that are allowing vendors to offer the advantages of pricing optimization and management without the “science project” approach, which has previously convinced many that the returns did not...

I am happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Value Index research, an assessment of how well vendors’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Ventana Research Value Index: Subscription Management is the distillation of a year of market and product research by Ventana Research. Drawing on our Benchmark Research, we apply a structured methodology built on evaluation categories that reflect...

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Subscription Management, I want to share some of my observations about an important component of subscription management: Contract management.

Having just completed the 2023 Ventana Research Value Index for Subscription Management, I want to share some of my observations about how the market is evolving. The era of subscriptions has transformed the way businesses operate and consumers engage with services across every industry. Organizations are increasingly adopting a digital approach to selling goods and services, wherein customers...

Conga is part of our Office of Revenue market coverage and I recently attended the 2023 Conga Connect conference held in Orlando during April of 2023. The conference was the public reveal of a new Conga, with significant announcements in three main areas. First was the overall positioning within a self-designated category of revenue life cycle management. Secondly was the first public revealing...

I have been involved with customer relationship management for over 15 years, and although that is not as long as the category has been around, it does coincide with an era where companies and commentators are calling into question the application’s effectiveness. To counter this perception, both CRM vendors and complementary third-party “add-ons” have developed new functionality that aims to...

Configure, price and quote (CPQ) software has been traditionally viewed as a specialist outpost of software, almost exclusively B2B and predominately used in manufacturing or specialty chemicals or other industries where there were large variants of similar products that required careful configuration, pricing and ultimately generating a quote that could be forwarded to a prospective customer for...

Ventana Research has announced its market agenda for 2023, continuing a 20-year tradition of credibility and trust in our objective efforts to educate and guide the technology market. Our research and insights are backed by our expertise and independence, as we do not share our Market Agenda or our market research – including analyst and market perspectives – with any external party before it is...

Those of us who have worked in or alongside sales teams have observed that many sales fundamentals have changed over the years. Yet, in many ways, they have not. One essential that has not changed is sales enablement. How do you onboard salespeople and quickly bring them up to speed? Or, how do you introduce new products and services so the sales team is conversant and knowledgeable about them?...

The technology industry has established itself as a pivotal force in its ability to help organizations become more intelligent and automated. But doing so has required a journey of epic proportions for most organizations that have had to endure a transition of competencies and skills that was, in many places, transitioned to consulting firms who were hired appropriately to manage changes....

The idea of partnerships in business is most definitely not new. Wholesaling through distributors and retailers is centuries old. For some industries, their entire model is selling and servicing through partners. Think auto parts, and the auto part stores visible in most neighborhoods. But what is new is that partnerships are moving beyond this reseller model towards product partnerships, where a...

The topic of revenue operations has been extensively covered recently, not least by vendors extolling the virtues of their particular offering. But as with much of the software industry, vendors often see the market through the lens of their current product capabilities rather than what is necessarily needed. With the rise of the mixed-revenue model that includes subscription and usage pricing as...

Much has been written in recent years on the emergence of subscription management as a new revenue model that both vendors and buyers are embracing as the future. The benefits speak to the value of a predictable revenue stream for the vendor, but more importantly, the advantages to the customer who needs a lower initial outlay, predetermined expense over the lifetime of usage and the ability to...

You would be forgiven for thinking that no one buys anything in person any more given the pages of digital ink spilled over the rise of digital commerce led by the rise and rise of Amazon. However, one quick errand run on a Saturday morning would easily give lie to this, as parking lots are full, not just at grocery stores but for everyday retail as well as big box stores. Likewise, in...

There are more digital channels in the commerce space than ever before: the web, mobile apps, text, voice-activated “agents,” video and social channels. Conversational computing and hyper-personalization are transforming customer engagement, and organizations may need to undergo a digital platform renovation to optimize customer and product experiences or risk lagging behind competitors. B2B...

“Lead to cash” is an often-used term and is a companion to “quote to cash” and “order to cash”. What they all represent is an approach which recognizes that there is a process designed to convert a lead from a qualified interest to an active sale, through quote and contract negotiation, to order or contract, invoice and payment. “Quote to cash” and “order to cash” are subsets of this process,...