It’s unfortunately true that all too often marketing, sales, and key account management departments function in silos. We believe that this leads to missed revenue-generating opportunities and poor customer experiences. We also believe that the only way to address this problem is by implementing Revenue Operations.
Revenue Ops is a crucial function within publishers and media houses that drives and manages revenue growth. It aligns all the revenue-related activities across marketing, sales, and customer service departments to help publishers generate revenue while having transparent visibility into all the activities involved in that critical task.
According to an article in Boston Consulting Group (BCG), Revenue Ops can help publishers increase sales productivity by 10% to 20%, lead acceptance by 10%, and improve customer satisfaction by 15% to 20%. It also has the potential to reduce go-to-market expenses by 30% by centralizing all the activities of the marketing, sales, and customer-focused teams.
Given the significance of Revenue Ops, it is essential to do it correctly. However, it is still misunderstood or poorly applied. Hence, a misguided or wrong strategy or a shaky or misaligned process could lead to losses and several missed opportunities.
Let’s look at what happens when Revenue Ops is not done right.
Challenges In Implementing And Managing Revenue Ops
Before we consider the impact of poor revenue ops management, let’s understand the challenges publishers face in implementing and managing it:
Manual processes
Revenue Ops includes various activities, such as entering data, analysing it, and generating reports. This has to be done for several customers across a huge number of transactions and campaigns. Doing them manually can be an arduous task. This becomes a bigger problem when the publisher’s business scales or at busy times like the festive season. Manually processing and analysing large volumes of revenue data can become time-consuming, error-prone, and inaccurate. Publishers cannot depend on manual processes to make data-driven decisions and generate revenue at scale.
Legacy tech stack
Publishers must use and integrate modern tools and platforms like a made-to-purpose Media ERP to drive revenue growth in a rapidly changing technology landscape. However, most often, publishers are stuck with a legacy tech stack that has limitations in integration capabilities, cannot centralize revenue and customer data, and does not create a single source of truth. This limits their access to real-time and holistic data and prevents them from analysing and making data-driven decisions to improve revenue generation.
Lack of collaboration between teams
To identify an opportunity, publishers must bring together all their revenue-generating and managing teams, such as Ad Ops, finance, sales, marketing, and customer service. However, most often, these teams function in silos. This leads to communication issues between teams, misalignment in strategies, and decision-making delays. Without collaboration, the teams cannot share crucial insights and might lose opportunities to generate revenue. This can severely impact customer experience.
Poor data quality and governance
Without effective and complete data governance, publishers will have difficulty gathering and analysing revenue data from different systems and platforms. They will have limited insights into revenue trends, lack understanding of which demand partners and channels perform the best and provide maximum yield, and face challenges in identifying long-term trends. This will eventually result in poor revenue outcomes.
What Happens When Revenue Ops Isn’t Done Right?
If the challenges are not addressed on time or publishers don’t implement revenue ops correctly, they are likely to face the following problems:
Revenue leakage
When publishers use manual processes and legacy tools like spreadsheets, they will struggle to collate and track revenue from various sources, such as direct sales and programmatic advertising. This will inevitably lead to errors in tracking data and even result in revenue leakage.
Lose opportunities to generate revenue
Publishers have to spend time consolidating and analysing the fragmented data collected from different sources. This process is so time-consuming that sometimes publishers fail to identify, predict, and capitalize on revenue-generating trends. This leads to publishers losing opportunities to earn more revenue.
Increasing costs
When publishers rely on manual data tracking and analysis, they spend more time on data entry, reconciliation, and reporting than on revenue-generating activities. This increases labour costs and impacts revenue operations due to a lack of automation.
No competitive advantage
The digital publishing industry is hyper-competitive. Hence, if publishers want to thrive, they must be able to analyse revenue data quickly, identify trends early, and adapt new strategies to innovate and gain a competitive advantage. Without a clear picture of the revenue data, the publishers cannot make any business decisions and might fall behind the competition.
How To Do Revenue Ops Correctly?
Publishers must know how to do Revenue Ops correctly to extract the maximum revenue from their operations. They cannot do this until they stop using Excel spreadsheets to track and manage revenue and replace manual processes with automation.
At YuktaMedia, we understand the unique challenges the media industry faces due to increasing competition, tight regulations, and changes in customer trends.
That’s why we have developed a Media ERP called YuktaOne to manage end-to-end ad, revenue, and sales operations across different channels, such as Online / Digital, TV/ Broadcasting, OTT / CTV, Print, and Radio.
Unified Revenue Trend (URT) is a revenue operations solution within YuktaOne that helps media publishers:
- Centralize and segment data: URT collects and consolidates revenue data from multiple demand partners and channels into a single platform and segments it to provide publishers with a comprehensive view of revenue earned. They can identify underserved customer segments or channels, and develop strategies to target them and explore new revenue streams.
- Slice and dice data: URT provides advanced filter and segmentation capabilities that help publishers slice and dice the data based on various parameters, such as date range, property source, demand partners, country, and more. This gives them a clear picture of the trends and performance across various industry segments and helps them find ways to optimize and manage revenue.
- Analyze and make data-driven decisions: URT offers detailed breakdowns of revenue data that enable publishers to analyze performance at a granular level. They can drill down into specific metrics, view daily data distributions, and generate graphical representations like line and pie charts for quick analysis and visualization.
For more information about how YuktaOne and URT can help you do Revenue Ops correctly, contact us.
