Revenue orchestration: How a new software category is revolutionizing RevOps

For most of my career, revenue management meant cobbling together an array of point solutions.

You had one tool for managing core selling activities. You had another for tracking buyer engagement. You had another for more advanced analytics. You ended up with many streams of diverse (and often subjective) data — and it was on you to synthesize their inputs into some version of the objective truth.

Revenue orchestration platforms (ROPs) put an end to all that. As defined by Forrester in their report The Revenue Orchestration Platforms For B2B Landscape, Q1 2024, an ROP is a technological platform that “enables B2B frontline resources to design, execute, capture, analyze, and improve buyer and customer engagement while optimizing productivity and internal revenue processes.”

In other words: a one-stop shop for the entire sales process. ROPs consolidate the unwieldy tech stacks of old, consolidating data sources into a unified – and often AI-powered – experience designed to build better sales processes.

In light of the new report, The Forrester Wave^TM: Revenue Orchestration Platforms For B2B, Q3 2024 – and Gong’s position as a Leader in the evaluation – let’s dive into why these platforms are so valuable for RevOps leaders, and how strategic adoption can drive better outcomes across a revenue org. 

1. Engagement. ROPs automate many manual engagement tasks — e.g., follow-up emails — ensuring that buyer/customer engagement happens at the right time, over the right medium, and in the right tone to go after the most immediate and winnable opportunities.

2. Capture. ROPs ingest data from any and all customer interactions — phone calls, video calls, emails, texts, etc. — and structure it in a way that makes it possible to analyze en masse. Where before, data capture relied on manual (and subjective) rep entry into CRMs, ROPs automatically capture all of this data and prepare it for unified analysis.

3. Analysis. Having captured the data, ROPs can also analyze it, finding patterns across a larger volume of data than humans could possibly handle manually.

4. Optimization. Finally, based on the patterns they uncover, ROPs provide guidance on what to prioritize — within individual deals and across entire revenue organizations.

RevOps’ objectives break into three main categories: productivity, predictability, and growth. And those categories are all equally supported by revenue orchestration platforms. 

1. Productivity. Sales reps spend as little as 28% of their time actually selling, the rest of it consumed by manual administrative tasks. ROPs automate repetitive, manual tasks — data entry, deal commentary, follow-up emails — maximizing the time sales reps spend selling.

2. Predictability. In addition to giving sellers more time to sell, automating the above processes also improves their accuracy and objectivity. More accurate, objective, and comprehensive deal data means RevOps leaders have more power to predict the micro-outcomes of individual deals and the macro-outcomes of entire revenue organizations. Predictability becomes more of a science than an art. 

3. Growth. Improved predictability means higher forecasting accuracy, which in turn helps the entire organization deploy its capital more effectively. You can identify which areas are strong and weak, understand why they’re that way, and make new investments in a way that eradicates weakness and amplifies strengths. Plus, you can then focus sellers’ efforts on immediate, winnable opportunities and high-impact deals.

Overall, this makes it more likely that revenue leaders will achieve their one unifying goal: Hit the revenue number, quarter after quarter, year after year. A more productive workforce, better predictability signals, and more intelligently deployed capital is a recipe for sustained success.

In the recently published “The Forrester Wave^TM: Revenue Orchestration Platforms For B2B, Q3 2024” report, Forrester assesses top revenue orchestration vendors, classifying those providers as Leaders, Strong Performers, Contenders, and Challengers. 

When evaluating Gong, Forrester found us to be a Leader, and we received the highest score in the Current Offering category of any vendor assessed. And we believe there are a few reasons as to why. 

To quote from the Forrester report, “Gong’s AI reveals unique buyer and seller insights to improve deal outcomes. One of the few companies founded with AI at its core, Gong has used its nine-year AI résumé to create transformative insights for revenue organizations.” 

And not all AI is equal. Gong is the only vendor to receive top scores possible across all three AI criteria, including AI automation, guidance, and a range of analytics insights. “[Gong’s] ability to consistently advance the application of AI in sales has been a key differentiator. With CI as the foundation of the platform, Gong excels at turning unstructured interactions into insights. This foundation plays a major role in its ability to unlock the value of genAI for revenue teams.” 

It’s great to see Forrester recognize Gong’s unique, consistent approach, and I’m excited for the opportunities ROPs unlock for RevOps teams. I joined Gong over 4 years ago because I saw unlimited use cases for RevOps teams to leverage the data, insights, recommendations, and automations from the platform Gong was building.  

RevOps is about driving efficiency and effectiveness, and ROPs removes so much of the frustration we’ve experienced when trying to drive productivity –inaccurate, biased, and incomplete data compounded by tool bloat, lack of adoption, and too many priorities.  ROPs allow us to iterate quickly and confidently – driving success through the right change at the right time for the right teams. No more spray and pray because we don’t know where or who.  No more throwing the entire playbook at the problem because we don’t understand why.

ROPs dramatically raise the standard for the type and level of data RevOps leaders can leverage. Never before has it been possible to capture, analyze, and use so much accurate, unbiased data for such a comprehensive array of RevOps tasks — from the simplest follow-up emails to the most sophisticated deal analysis and forecasting. Gong is proud to stand at the forefront of the burgeoning category of ROPs, as we know these platforms help sales teams embrace a single source of truth and strengthen the entire GTM motion.