Vena Solutions has announced a new solution to help business leaders understand the underlying factors of revenue growth in their organisations. This is not merely a tool for the CFO. It is targeted at assisting leaders from areas such as sales, marketing, customer care as well as finance. Vena Revenue Performance Management (RPM) is available now in beta. Vena RPM will be generally available in Q1 2018. It will have an annual subscription either as a stand alone solution or as part of one of Vena’s Enterprise Suite packages.
What are the factors?
Vena claims that the new software brings in all the factors of revenue growth. It cites data feeds from CRM, ERP, web analytics, marketing automation and general ledger systems. In a separate document it references feeds from Google Analytics, Marketo, NetSuite, Salesforce and FinancialForce. It isn’t clear which other data sources it supports.
The data extracted is then presented in personalised dashboards that highlight the most important factors for a given role. The inference is that the CMO can analyse the impact of different marketing campaigns against not just the leads generated, but the quality of those leads. How many of the leads highlighted actually moved down the funnel and became customers. More importantly, what were the revenues and profits generated by those customers.
Craig Schiff, president and CEO, BPM Partners commented: “Vena’s Revenue Performance Management provides companies with a unified understanding of what really drives their revenues, enabling them to act on the metrics that matter most for business growth. The focus on all aspects of revenue growth and not just expense tracking makes Vena RPM a potential game changer for organizations that haven’t had access to this type of information before.”
Why a game changes?
It is unclear what the actual capabilities of Vena RPM is. Is it capable of bringing together the disparate thread of data and revealing insights about revenue? Vena claims that it will help align departments as they plan for growth. If this means that Marketing are able to see the impact of specific campaigns on service teams then this will be very useful. For example, a campaign around personalised support for a product might see an increase in leads, but also calls to the service centre. Once the early case studies are unveiled we will better understand the capabilities and benefits.
However, the indicators are that the analysis is still relatively siloed without the complete cross departmental view. Certainly marketing is able to pull together data from Google Analytics, Salesforce and Marketo, but whether that correlates through to the profitability data is unclear.
What does this mean
Don Mal, CEO of Vena adds: “Bringing together data from across the business, Vena’s RPM software gives companies a clear understanding of the factors that drive (or get in the way of) optimal revenue growth. With this industry-first technology, we’re not only helping companies redefine their core financial processes, but giving them new insights into the best way to grow their business. Where most financial software focuses on companies’ expenses, RPM tells the untold story behind their top line.”
Whether this is a game changer ET is less certain. ERP solutions, are constantly evolving revenue recognition solutions, both for compliance and business performance reasons. Both NetSuite and FinancialForce deliver revenue recognition solutions which could compete with the Vena RPM. The data sheet states: “manage different revenue recognition methods for services/subscription and terminations” as a benefit for the CFO.
It will be interesting to see where Vena takes this product. Its potential is huge but it might not be welcomed by all its partners. It might also be advised to reveal which solutions it can take data from and they are in real time. If customers can deliver better planning leading to increased revenues that that will be a very powerful message.