The Revenue Blog /
The New Tectonic Shift. Welcome to the ARR Economy
The New Tectonic Shift. Welcome to the ARR Economy
Topics covered in this article
We have come a long way from the inception of the cloud in the late 90s in the form of Application Service Providers (ASPs). A lot has happened since then. In the last 2 decades, we have seen an explosion in cloud SaaS applications, infrastructure, and open source. And while software has become cheaper and faster to produce, distributing and monetizing software has become a lot more challenging.
The Shift From TCV to ARR is Here
Gone are the days where the seller can sell 1/2/3 years contracts, show up 3 months before the renewal, send a renewal quote and move on. Today it’s about continuous ARR management, not TCV. And the ARR economy has fundamentally changed the way buying and selling happens. We are playing by new rules; one in which, selling never stops.
ARR has shifted the leverage to buyers away from vendors. Buyers don’t commit to long-term contracts, engage in self-initiated trials, can buy on usage and consumption-based pricing, scale that up or down, and buy both remotely and directly in marketplaces like AWS without requiring much from “land” sellers.
ARR buyers also expect continuous innovation (switching costs are low and competitors are a Drift/Intercom chat away) and continuous engagement. Selling is no longer episodic but rather a continuous activity.
But vendor organizations are not designed to deliver this continuous engagement. While customer success has emerged as a pivotal role, it still is reactive, tactical and remains dis-jointed from land/expand motions delivered by renewal and growth AEs. Also delivering continuous engagement is not just a seller’s job or a CSM’s job. It is everyone’s job.
Every front office worker is a Revenue Worker; from CTOs, to product managers, to product marketing, support and executives. But these functions remain dis-jointed, operate in their silos, break the customer experience, and aren’t set up to deliver in the ARR continuum.
Finally, the systems designed for SaaS and TCV era are woefully inadequate to help vendor organizations make a shift towards the ARR mindset.
Current CRMs Are Not Built for the ARR Era
Current CRMs and Revenue systems were designed for the manual & infrequent data entry for people in sales roles. Not to automatically capture every customer touchpoint, interaction, and engagement from every role. Critical data like customer engagement, product usage, revenue worker activity, conversations & revenue data are siloed in separate systems. These systems weren’t designed to automatically collect and connect – streaming & unstructured data from diverse customer and vendor data streams.
As a result, there is no single pane of glass to bring all Revenue Workers together on the customer truth.
These TCV systems are also rigidly Opportunity based. Not Account-based. Not Activity-based. They don’t measure or optimize Account engagement, playbook stages, customer ARR journey, and deliver on ARR reporting needs. Even simple query like joining an Account table with Email activity is not supported. Today true ARR reporting requires custom, expensive, and time-consuming data warehouse integrations & modeling work.
Enter BoostUp. Designed for the ARR Era.
Welcome to BoostUp. The data intelligence platform was designed for the ARR era.
BoostUp is designed to handle multiple types of data and deliver Revenue Worker productivity in a single system. We are architected to absorb all structured, unstructured, manually entered, natural language data (email/transcripts), streaming data (email/meetings) in a single non-relational big table schema that allows multi-directional querying, reporting, analytics, and correlational insights.
BoostUp becomes the single pane of glass for all Revenue Workers at the Account & Opportunity level and allows them to collaborate from a common truth. This Account view automatically aggregates all relationships, contacts, communications, meetings, calls, product usage, support tickets in one place and scores objective account health and risk from lack of customer engagement and playbook deviations.
BoostUp then allows the ARR operations system to write custom policies and playbook rules, flexibly report on account risk, revenue, and Revenue Worker productivity metrics. The ROI of BoostUp is simple – higher customer engagement and higher ARR.
If you are ready to shift or optimize your Revenue Work for the ARR, let’s talk!