Let's face it: sales isn't getting any easier. In 2024, competition is fierce, buying groups are expanding, and sales cycles seem to stretch on forever. From front-line reps to the C-suite, everyone's feeling the heat to hit their targets.
Enter the revenue orchestration platform (ROP). This emerging technology category is built to help B2B companies design, execute, and improve their entire sales strategy. But what exactly is it, and why should you care? Let’s get into it.
See why Outreach was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Revenue Orchestration Platforms B2B, Q3 2024
Outreach scored a 5/5 rating in 14 criteria including prospecting workflows, advanced security and compliance, and range of analytics insights. Get your complimentary copy of the report to check out the full write-up — and see how Outreach measures up.
First, what is a revenue orchestration platform?
In 2024, Forrester coined the term revenue orchestration platform to describe a new category of software vendors that offer a “supergroup” of sales capabilities traditionally sold as standalone point solutions. By combining sales engagement, conversation intelligence, and revenue operations capabilities into one platform, this technology, “enables B2B frontline resources to design, execute, capture, analyze, and improve buyer and customer engagement while optimizing productivity and internal revenue processes.”
“…(ROPs) are the closest revenue technology has come thus far to providing a ‘single pane of glass’ for frontline resources”
The rise of revenue orchestration
Rigor is the word of the day — and the foreseeable future. As businesses face mounting pressure to boost profitability, revenue-generating teams are now expected to operate with the same precision as their counterparts in operations, IT, and finance. But many organizations are still stuck in the past, relying on gut instinct, excessive training, or a mishmash of poorly integrated point solutions.
If this sounds familiar, you're not alone. At Outreach, we've heard these pain points from countless revenue leaders across industries. That's why, in 2021, we leveled up. Building on our Outreach’s roots in sales engagement we launched the first sales execution platform designed to support all sales roles. Our goal: To give teams the tools they need to design, measure, and execute a revenue strategy that is disciplined, achievable, and optimized for every stage of the customer journey.
The market has taken notice, and other sales tech vendors are racing to offer a similar end-to-end solution. This year, Forrester coined a new term for an emerging category of revtech capabilities: revenue orchestration platforms. According to Forrester Principal Analysts Anthony McPartlin and Seth Marrs, these platforms “are the closest revenue technology has come thus far to providing a ‘single pane of glass’ for frontline resources.”
In short, revenue orchestration platforms offer a powerful way to do more with less — a critical advantage in 2024’s challenging sales landscape.
"We’ve created our leading revenue orchestration platform through deep partnerships with our customers to ensure they achieve their sales execution goals. We will continue to push the industry forward as we build for the evolving workflows of modern sales and revenue teams across the customer lifecycle."
What sets revenue orchestration platforms apart
You might be wondering, "How are ROPs different from the tools we're already using?" It's a fair question. Let's break it down:
The old way: A recipe for stagnation
Many sales teams approach their challenges in ways that, frankly, leave a lot to be desired:
The "Do Nothing" approach: Some teams stick to what they know, allowing sellers to operate as they always have. It's easy, sure, but it's like leaving money on the table. You're missing out on huge opportunities to optimize and scale.
The "More is More" philosophy: Others try to plug the gaps by throwing more people and spreadsheets at the problem. They hire extra sales ops staff or roll out more training, hoping to fix their CRM funnel stages. But here's the thing: adding headcount doesn't magically make your sales process measurable. And CRM stages are just the outcome of a process, not the process itself.
The "Point Solution Puzzle": Some teams invest in a variety of tools or add-ons for specific stages of the sales funnel. While these can offer some benefits, they often create more problems than they solve. They're expensive, they don't play well together, and they rarely align with how sellers actually work.
The ROP advantage: A unified approach
Modern go-to-market organizations need a solution for capturing activity data from disparate go-to-market workflows and increased visibility into activity at every stage of the sales funnel so that rev-ops and sales leaders can spot areas of risk and opportunities for improvement. To drive high performance, one system should be shared by sales development, sales, and customer success, as well as expose data and insights that help leaders scale what works and stop what doesn’t.
When designed well, workflows provide roadmaps for the many processes that go-to-market teams need to run, and they can be measured and continuously improved to adapt to the evolving needs and expectations of customers.
How do revenue orchestration platforms work?
Now that we've covered the "what" and "why" of ROPs, let's dive into the "how." Think of an ROP as a conductor for your sales team. It keeps everyone on the same page, ensuring that every part of your sales process works together smoothly. Powered by AI, ROPs automate tasks, provide insights, and offer guidance, improving your team’s sales efficiency and effectiveness.
According to Forrester Principal Analysts Anthony McPartlin and Seth Marrs, ROPs enable four integrated and iterative processes:
Engagement: ROPs automate repetitive prospecting tasks, allowing your team to efficiently engage and convert leads across multiple channels like email, voice, text, and video.
Capture: ROPs automatically record buyer interactions and link them to your CRM, eliminating the need for manual tracking. They also combine this data with other internal and external signals to improve buyer interactions, productivity, and internal processes.
Analysis: ROPs serve as the central hub for capturing buyer signals and linking them to deals. They use sales-specific algorithms to analyze these signals, providing unique insights that help sales teams improve their outcomes and gain better visibility.
Optimization: ROPs don’t just provide insights — they guide your team on how to act on them. They offer clear recommendations for improving engagement with buyers, managing sales pipelines, forecasting, and handling accounts, helping you prioritize what to do next.
5 use cases your platform should solve for
Technology that provides task execution is not enough. Today's revenue teams need technology they can use to build and execute a disciplined, achievable, and (most importantly) winning strategy.
Modern go-to-market organizations need a system where they can design, measure, and execute informed and repeatable workflows to drive high performance.
Five distinct priorities form the critical use cases for successful revenue orchestration. These fundamental priorities are universal across industries and company sizes, representing the essential needs of sales and revenue teams at all levels.
Prospect and manage accounts
Build quality pipeline by ensuring the right message reaches the right prospect at the right time. A strong revenue orchestration platform helps you grow, organize, and manage your book of business, enabling you to identify every opportunity. By enhancing account planning, automating inbound and outbound prospecting, and facilitating account development, it ensures that you maximize your reach and effectively engage potential customers throughout the sales cycle.
Manage and guide deals
Align with your buyers and sell with confidence by guiding every customer interaction with real-time data insights. A revenue orchestration platform empowers you to improve deal health and minimize risks to closing. It streamlines meeting management, supports deal progression, facilitates multi-threading by engaging additional decision-makers, and prioritizes high-stakes deals to ensure they stay on track, ultimately driving successful outcomes.
Coach and improve
Drive revenue team rigor by using data to scale what works and change what doesn't. A robust platform provides targeted coaching, best practice workflows, and real-time support to continuously improve performance. It accelerates ramping for new reps, enforces qualification best practices, monitors key activities, and offers deal inspection tools. By focusing on skills development and accountability, it ensures your team operates at peak efficiency.
Forecast and plan
Predict revenue outcomes accurately and build an informed, achievable revenue plan through data-driven forecasting. A sophisticated platform allows you to inspect your team’s pipeline, manage opportunities effectively, and adjust sales forecasts based on real-time insights. It supports pipeline management for current and future quarters, and AI-driven forecasting helps model different revenue scenarios, enabling precise and strategic annual planning based on historical trends and customer data.
Retain and expand
Turn customers into advocates with seamless onboarding and proactive engagement. A comprehensive platform monitors account health and drives coordinated plays to secure renewals, mitigate churn risk, and expand accounts. It ensures smooth hand-offs during onboarding, maintains regular touchpoints with stakeholders, and facilitates upsell and cross-sell strategies so teams can grow customer relationships and drive long-term success.
“Outreach’s workflow capabilities allow companies to create sophisticated cadences that can be linked, automated, and assigned to multiple users. Its advanced workflow creates advantages that expand beyond engagement into critical revenue orchestration areas such as AI-optimized workflows, proactive guidance, trained triggers, and a thriving ecosystem of third-party integrations.”
The Forrester Wave™: Revenue Orchestration Platforms B2B, Q3 2024
AI’s role in revenue orchestration
AI has become a hot topic in revenue orchestration, moving beyond simple pattern recognition and predictive modeling. Today's AI systems are capable of synthesizing vast amounts of data from various sources, generating actionable insights that were previously hidden in the complexity of modern sales ecosystems.
"The best sellers are efficient, methodical, and very clear about what they want to accomplish. They know AI is a means to an end. AI shouldn’t replace sellers, but should be woven across revenue workflows to help them get to that end faster."
Unlike traditional predictive AI, which often provided insights that weren't particularly actionable, modern AI in revenue orchestration platforms offers clear paths forward.
In other words, it doesn't just tell you what might happen — it suggests what you should do about it. This evolution means that sales teams can make informed decisions quickly, prioritize their efforts, and adapt their strategies in real time.
Human-AI collaboration: The future of sales workflows
The future of revenue orchestration lies in the seamless collaboration between AI and human expertise. We're moving from an AI-assist model to an AI-led approach, where the system directs the next best plan of execution based on a wealth of buyer and seller data. However, this doesn't sideline human input; rather, it elevates it. In this new paradigm, sales professionals approve, edit, or reject AI-generated plans. The system then executes the plan, reports back, and evolves based on outcomes and seller feedback.
This human-AI partnership ensures that sales processes become more consistent and repeatable over time, as best practices are identified, codified, and disseminated across the organization.
Equally important, this approach frees up sales professionals to focus on what they do best: managing relationships, providing strategic inputs, and acting as trusted advisors to their customers. The result is a revenue-generation engine that combines the efficiency and scalability of AI with the nuanced understanding and adaptability of human sales professionals.
“Embracing AI in sales means understanding how AI can be most relevant at the point of the customer. Exercising this muscle is hard, but using AI to improve every interaction to solve pains in the seller/buyer relationship is a net positive for everyone involved. What work can you let AI do that improves the empathy reflected in relationships with your prospects?"
See the power of revenue orchestration
In 2024's challenging B2B sales landscape, the old ways just aren't cutting it anymore. Revenue orchestration platforms (ROPs) have emerged as a unified solution to design, execute, and improve your entire sales strategy.
By delivering a seamless user experience, leveraging meaningful AI capabilities, and enabling rigor and consistency in revenue execution, ROPs empower teams to drive frontline productivity and enhance buyer interactions across the entire customer journey.
To understand how the top ROP vendors stack up, turn to The Forrester Wave™: Revenue Orchestration Platforms for B2B, Q3 2024 report. This comprehensive analysis breaks down the strengths and capabilities of the most significant providers, offering you the insights needed to make an informed decision for your organization.
Our platform scored a 5/5 rating in 14 criteria, including prospecting workflow, advanced security and compliance, and innovation. Get your complimentary copy of the report to check out the full write-up and see how Outreach measures up.
There’s more to explore
Learn why Outreach was named a leader in The Forrester Wave™: Revenue Orchestration Platforms B2B, Q3 2024.
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