ISG Research is happy to share insights gleaned from our latest Buyers Guide, an assessment of how well software providers’ offerings meet buyers’ requirements. The Revenue Lifecycle Management: ISG Research Buyers Guide is the distillation of a year of market and product research by ISG Research.
The fact that many enterprises have already begun or are in the process of digital modernization is a testament to the rapid rise of digital products and services, new direct
With additional sales models other than one-time sales, the revenue from a sale is spread over the lifetime of the engagement rather than received as an upfront lump sum. This requires sustained engagement with customers beyond the break-even point in order to have a profitable business model. This sustained engagement can also be referred to as the customer lifecycle and, in this case, the processes and people supported by technology to ensure that a provider is doing all it can to encourage the customer to engage with the seller. Often starting at the quote stage of a qualified sales engagement, the revenue lifecycle follows the buyer’s journey through to contract negotiation and agreement, provisioning and fulfillment as required, invoicing, payment, and on to renewal or contract and potential amendments to the initial order or additions in terms of new product or services.
ISG Research defines revenue lifecycle management as a unified platform approach that connects customer-facing teams to boost revenue and margin through consistent, long-term customer engagement. This can start with an initial quotation and move through contract negotiations to fulfillment and invoicing and on to renewal and expansion. Individual applications that could be used as part of this process are Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ), contract lifecycle management (CLM), billing, revenue recognition, and revenue lifecycle platform services. As this quote-to-cash process touches many different internal processes, to avoid common issues with handover from one team to another, a true revenue lifecycle management system not only manages digital documents but also digitizes and stores all the important terms within the documents. In this way, errors are minimized, and all relevant data and required information is transparent to all who are involved with the customer, at every part of the lifecycle.
With digitized billing schedules and calendars, key events can trigger automatic activity such as renewal outreach. With digitized terms, there is no need for one team to input data to pass on to the next team as the key data persists in the relevant platform data store. Likewise, analysis of repeated steps within the overall process can identify areas for process improvements; for example, a particular type of contract for a particular type of customer often requires responses from the customer’s legal counsel. In fact, all areas of the process are open to analysis if the overall process is represented within the revenue lifecycle management platform. Analytics can be used to better understand what the ideal or expected intervals between processes are, or where certain characteristics of a customer, region or product cause processes to take longer or require additional steps. In this way, the revenue lifecycle management system and process can be continually analyzed and improved to the benefit of the customer experience and ultimately contribute to sustained customer engagement.
As has been previously mentioned, the overall revenue lifecycle management process has at its core, clearly defined activities spread across different departments and teams.
Despite the business imperative, we assert that through 2026, more than one-half of enterprises will still be using manual processes to integrate quotes and contracts, leading to billing and delivery errors and poor customer experience.
Within the overall Revenue Lifecycle Management Buyers Guide, there are sub-guides available for the main functional areas covered by revenue lifecycle management, including CPQ, CLM, revenue recognition, and those functions that support revenue lifecycle platforms. For the overall report, providers offer most, if not all, of these functional applications on a single platform.
The first touch point is the quoting exercise that often uses a CPQ application. Historically, the configuration part of the CPQ process was restricted to certain industries such as manufacturing and chemicals. For many other types of business, it was like using a hammer to crack a nut.
But increasingly, as different types of digital products and bundles become more commonplace, more industries are looking to modernize their CPQ process. More modern CPQ applications are more closely integrated with pricing and margin details; some enable salespeople to see the commissions they might get for the deal. More advanced systems show the implications for competitiveness based on buyer propensity for a given discount and the implications for margin. Still others allow a shared digital space for prospective buyers to have a live, on-demand interaction rather than a slow back and forth via email conversation or through a deal desk function. And increasingly, as reflects expectations, speed of response is important to both performance when selecting from long and complex lists of products and product combinations, as well as expecting a more conversational interface.
When it comes to setting up CPQ applications, the historical approach was to treat them as a waterfall-style IT project, with the implementation team trying to capture every edge case they could document. But the result of this was often projects that took too long to implement, along with the recognition that not every use case could be captured or that it was even necessary to support a long tail of permutations. Given its reputation for taking an inordinate amount of time, we looked at the ways that today’s CPQ providers are using technology to improve the setup process to speed the time to value. We also looked for innovative ways that providers are digitizing the process such that quotes can be exchanged and approved electronically and that the terms can persist as actionable values and not just as an electronic document.
The next step in the CPQ process is often the legal contract negotiation, which is almost always the case in B2B sales, whether for a new sale, an upsell/cross-sell or a renewal. Contract Lifecycle Management is the application category for contract management. As part of this Revenue Lifecycle Management Buyers Guide, we are focusing on “sell-side” CLM, i.e., capabilities that specifically support the selling process as opposed to purchasing. In terms of overall functionality, we again looked for CLM products that digitize the contract terms as opposed to purely dealing with a digital document. Digitizing the terms also includes digitizing the clauses to enable analysis of possible risks or identification of terms that are potentially problematic, leading to the ability to construct contracts with minimal need to single thread through a legal approval process. One of the key capabilities of a CLM system is to provide more standardization. Often the contract negotiation process can significantly impact sales velocity and potentially the deal itself, regardless of the size or complexity of the deal. Typically, an enterprise will have not only a deal desk to review deals, but a legal department that must review all contracts, line by line, on the basis that most contracts are exceptions. This is often performed using documents that are emailed between internal and external parties, and it can result in whoever shouts loudest getting the attention of the legal department. With standardized contracts, the target should be that exceptions that require active involvement from legal should be in the minority rather than the majority. Another part of CLM is also digital document signing so that workflow and approvals, both internal and with a third party, can be all digital and do not necessarily require a handwritten signature. Smart approvals can route automatically based on an analysis of the context of changes in the contract, again with the aim of ensuring rapid progress without sacrificing guardrails and compliance with company policy.
Having secured the sale or renewal, the next step is provisioning, fulfillment and billing. And while provisioning and fulfillment are not the current concern of revenue lifecycle management, billing is, as it is an important part of the customer experience and contributes to the overall levels of satisfaction that promote strong, sustained engagement. As differences in product and service pricing models add to complexity, it is key that a successful sale or renewal leads to a timely and accurate invoice. This is very important in cases where a set of products and services may be provided by different business units. Customers do not want to see multiple invoices, thereby making an enterprise’s organizational structure the buyer’s issue. Likewise, with more complex pricing come challenges to accuracy. This is especially true of usage or volume tiered-based pricing where the final price can only be determined when all relevant transactions have been processed. With usage, unlike flat-fee subscription, it is harder to know what a plausible bill amount is. Certain types of invoices must include substantive details of how the total amount was derived, and this needs to be communicated to the customer.
Traditional ERP or in-house developed billing systems tend to revolve around singular one-time sales models with infrequent product and service changes and relatively simple pricing models. For the forward-looking enterprise, these legacy systems are often not agile or easily modifiable for increasingly complex business models and bundles of products and services. For the reasons mentioned above, not considering a billing event as part of customer experience is a mistake; moving billing closer to the other parts of revenue lifecycle management, notably the quote and contract processes, enables more direct billing based on the contract, order or plan. Modern billing systems, designed to accommodate subscription, usage and milestone (event) pricing, create billing schedules that project the billing periodicity as to what will be billed and when. This is key information that can be used for revenue and cash projections when combined with revenue recognition rules, which determine when the payments can be recognized under such common standards such as ASC606 (IFRS 15).
For products and services not sold on a one-time basis, the revenue associated with these items is spread over the lifetime of the contract. Based on contracted terms, the details of what was purchased, known as obligations, are tracked to enable the payments to be recognized from an accounting perspective. As any one contract could be for a variety of different products and services, it is important to track the right level of granularity to ensure that future invoice amounts are recognized correctly. Additional complexity comes from also having to track the standard selling price for each item to ensure contract prices are not skewed to high-margin products nor to low-margin products sold at an extreme discount. These standard selling prices (SSP) are either estimated offline or the application can help analyze what an average selling price should be. Finally, the revenue recognition application should be able to generate journal adjustments that can be integrated with the general ledger (GL) to enable adjusted accounts to be generated accurately based on revenue recognition rules. Whereas some approaches output a report, the superior option is to generate entries that can be posted to the GL; this often entails the application supporting a sub-ledger to align accounts with the GL. As for reporting, audit reports are important, as are more analytic capabilities to monitor revenue trends and compliance as well as helping to project revenue.
Although revenue lifecycle management is a relatively new term, the need for such an approach has been around far longer. As hybrid pricing models extend into the broader economy, many of the existing systems enterprises use will be unable to accommodate the challenges of a shift to more complex pricing and revenue models and, more importantly, are not platforms that support rapid change and innovation. The danger is that by not modernizing processes and systems that support the revenue lifecycle of customers, there exists the potential for mistakes across teams as one group hands over to another. As part of the need to maintain sustained engagement with customers, meeting the customers’ expectations in terms of responsiveness and accuracy is essential. The revenue lifecycle management approach with modernized systems is an important set of pre-requisites to ensure that changes to business models, necessary for competitiveness, are not held back by process or technology. And whether you are looking for a single supplier or a series of applications that work in conjunction with a core platform, this Buyers Guide will help identify providers that represent a relevant set of suppliers to seek out and evaluate.
The revenue lifecycle management process involves many different departments and teams and needs to integrate with multiple upstream and downstream systems. Examples of these third-party systems are digital commerce web sites, self-service portals, order fulfillment and financial accounting systems.
An important aspect of an effective revenue lifecycle management platform is the ability to support “straight-through processing” and automation. These key capabilities depend not just on workflow technology, but also on a unified, common data model. As mentioned, one of the key attributes of an integrated revenue lifecycle management system is a reduced need to pass data from one team to another through mechanisms such as email or chat. Platforms with a unified data model enable all the relevant information—terms and obligations, for example—to be stored once and shared across teams and processes as needed. This data is also used to drive downstream activities via integration using no code or low code tools.
A revenue lifecycle management platform should have a well-articulated and documented approach to utilizing artificial intelligence (AI), whether via machine learning (ML) predictive models, generative AI (GenAI) or agents. As this is a relatively immature and emerging functional area, we are evaluating a provider's general approach rather than delivery of complete AI or agentic solutions. This does include evaluation of how a provider uses AI to aid setup and configuration activities with a view toward simplifying implementation and speeding time to value.
The final component we evaluated was analytics and reporting. As the revenue lifecycle management platform is designed to support cross-team collaboration in support of sustained customer engagement, analytics and reporting have a role to play in understanding where bottlenecks and errors arise to enable continuous process improvements aimed at improving the overall customer experience. A unified platform and data model enables easier access to data that can tell a more comprehensive story as to effective revenue lifecycle management.
The ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Lifecycle Management evaluates software providers and products in key areas that support the entirety of the customer revenue lifecycle. This Buyers Guide evaluates products based on capabilities that facilitate the use of an integrated and extensible platform that can help orchestrate activities across all teams involved in sales, finance, legal and operations. In addition, the data and data model should be accessible using a set of standard reporting and analytic methods. The revenue lifecycle management platform supports these distinct activities with applications for CPQ, CLM, billing, revenue recognition and revenue lifecycle platform services.
This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of revenue lifecycle management as we define it: BillingPlatform, Chargebee, Conga, DealHub, Oracle, Salesforce, SAP, SOFTRAX, Zoho and Zuora.
This research-based index evaluates the full business and information technology value of revenue lifecycle management software offerings. We encourage you to learn more about our Buyers Guide and its effectiveness as a provider selection and RFI/RFP tool.
We urge organizations to do a thorough job of evaluating revenue lifecycle management offerings in this Buyers Guide as both the results of our in-depth analysis of these software providers and as an evaluation methodology. The Buyers Guide can be used to evaluate existing suppliers, plus provides evaluation criteria for new projects. Using it can shorten the cycle time for an RFP and the definition of an RFI.
The Buyers Guide for Revenue Lifecycle Management in 2025 finds Conga first on the list, followed by Oracle and BillingPlatform.
Software providers that rated in the top three of any category ﹘ including the product and customer experience dimensions ﹘ earn the designation of Leader.
The Leaders in Product Experience are:
The Leaders in Customer Experience are:
The Leaders across any of the seven categories are:
The overall performance chart provides a visual representation of how providers rate across product and customer experience. Software providers with products scoring higher in a weighted rating of the five product experience categories place farther to the right. The combination of ratings for the two customer experience categories determines their placement on the vertical axis. As a result, providers that place closer to the upper-right are “exemplary” and rated higher than those closer to the lower-left and identified as providers of “merit.” Software providers that excelled at customer experience over product experience have an “assurance” rating, and those excelling instead in product experience have an “innovative” rating.
Note that close provider scores should not be taken to imply that the packages evaluated are functionally identical or equally well-suited for use by every enterprise or process. Although there is a high degree of commonality in how organizations handle revenue lifecycle management, there are many idiosyncrasies and differences that can make one provider’s offering a better fit than another.
ISG Research has made every effort to encompass in this Buyers Guide the overall product and customer experience from our revenue lifecycle management blueprint, which we believe reflects what a well-crafted RFP should contain. Even so, there may be additional areas that affect which software provider and products best fit an enterprise’s particular requirements. Therefore, while this research is complete as it stands, utilizing it in your own organizational context is critical to ensure that products deliver the highest level of support for your projects.
You can find more details on our community as well as on our expertise in the research for this Buyers Guide.