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 Platforms: 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. We define a revenue lifecycle platform as an application that supports a unified data model, manages integrated workflow and process automation, facilitates low code external data source integration, provides a unified administration of users and security and access rights, has a developed AI framework, and support for revenue insight, analytics and reporting.
The revenue lifecycle 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 extracts, digitizes and stores all the important terms from within the documents. In this way, errors are minimized, and all necessary terms and information is made available to all who are involved with the customer at every part of the lifecycle.
Likewise, 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 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.
In addition to our publishing of the overall Revenue Lifecycle Management Buyers Guide, we are also publishing sub-guides covering the individual component parts of revenue lifecycle management, including revenue lifecycle platform services. 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 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 system is the reduction in 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 platform should also support a common user management approach with a single method to set up and manage users and set data and functional access controls. These are typically married to audit controls and reports to track who made changes and to what and when, an important part of security controls.
A revenue lifecycle 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. The platform should support embedded application-level AI or the ability to integrate proprietary models. 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 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.
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 are using 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, as highlighted in this overview, 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. These platforms and applications are an important set of functions and capabilities 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 ISG Buyers Guide™ for Revenue Lifecycle Platforms evaluates software providers and products in key areas that provide a platform for support of entirety of the customer’s 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 platform supports these distinct activities with applications for CPQ, CLM, billing and revenue recognition.
This research evaluates the following software providers that offer products that address key elements of revenue lifecycle platforms 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 platforms 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 platforms 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 Platforms in 2025 finds Conga first on the list, followed by BillingPlatform and Oracle.
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 platforms, 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 platforms 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.