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SaaS Visibility Isn’t Easy to Centralize
SaaS applications have changed how software is purchased. It’s no longer just IT or Finance involved in software purchasing, which makes it that much more complicated to track what applications are being purchased and used across a large organization. Marketing, Sales, and Customer Success teams are purchasing more software on their own, without including IT or Finance.
SaaS Management isn’t just an IT Problem
As a result of this shift in purchasing process and power, organizations are beginning to uncover a new set of challenges around SaaS management and SaaS optimization. These challenges are not just an IT problem to solve because there are a number of teams in the organization that is running into them, including Finance and every line of business that is purchasing, using, and renewing SaaS applications (like Sales, Marketing, Customer Success, HR, etc.).
Revenue Operations Can Pull It All Together
Revenue operations is a newer function that combines the traditional Marketing Ops, Sales Ops, and Customer Success Ops teams into one team responsible for the full funnel operations across the customer lifecycle. One part of this team’s responsibility is to manage the entire tech stack used across the customer lifecycle. Managing the tech stack includes the evaluation, procurement, integration, and systems administration of each application in use across the teams.
Gartner predicts that through 2017, 38% of technology purchases will be managed, defined, and controlled by business leaders. Much of this spend can be accounted for in the Marketing, Sales and Customer Success Teams, so when revenue ops teams are empowered with real-time SaaS spend and utilization data and a single SaaS system of record to manage the data, an immediate impact is realized to a significant part of the organization-wide technology spend.
What to Expect When Revenue Operations Manages SaaS
The revenue operations team is responsible for operations, enablement, and insights in addition to the technology stack. With this focus, it is natural for the revenue operations teams to care about the budget and expense of SaaS apps, ensure the value of each application is being realized and that each team member is trained on the appropriate applications to complete his/her job in the most efficient way possible. When a SaaS Optimization tool is implemented, the revenue operations team is equipped to solve the following SaaS challenges:
The SalesLoft Revenue Operations team is doing this today and realized the ROI of their investment in Zylo within the first month of using Zylo. And now, the rest of the organization can benefit from their leadership of implementing an enterprise-grade system capable of expanding to the rest of the organization.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Eric Christopher
Eric Christopher is CEO and Co-Founder of Zylo, the leading SaaS management platform. After 14 years of buying and selling software, Eric knew there had to be a better way to manage cloud applications within a company. Eric started his career in sales at ExactTarget from 2002 to 2010. He spent the next six years in Chicago leading sales teams at Shoutlet and Sprout Social Inc., and founded Zylo in 2016.