The Rise of Revenue Heroes

Nicole Dwyer | Friday, Mar 1st 2019
The Rise Of Revenue Heroes

“It looks like they just closed off another super impressive quarter. I just finished a check in call with them, and I could hear the delight in their voices.”

Namgyal Schaaf, our Director of Customer Success, was reporting on product usage trends during our weekly team meeting. He couldn’t help but remark on one of our customers, who had exceeded their aggressive year-end collections forecast by 40 percent. In monetary terms, it was four million dollars.

“Didn’t they go live not too long ago?” Anthony Venus, our CEO, asked.

“Yeah, and they’ve already surpassed their target. It only took two weeks for the results to start to show.”

“That’s impressive,” Mitch DeForest said. He was the Senior Account Executive who brought in this company. “I knew even during the discovery call that they could benefit from automating, but I didn’t know they would be this successful so quickly.”

Beginning early last year, we started to hear Namgyal highlight these customer success stories more and more during our team meetings. As Anthony always reminded us, “If we don’t make a product that makes our customers’ lives better, if we’re not addressing our customer’s pain point, then we have not succeeded.” Those of us on the customer facing teams are constantly assessing YayPay’s performance. Who is using it? How often? Is it effective? How quickly does it take to show return on investment (ROI)? As a learning organization we obsess over these metrics.

When you work together long enough in a company, a common language develops in the team. In this case, the words “Revenue Hero” began to emerge around these success stories. In every successful implementation, there was an internal champion who understood the impact that automation, visibility, and intelligence can bring to the finance back office. They evangelized internally to push for implementation and use. They worked with us proactively to ensure that YayPay integrated seamlessly with their internal systems and processes. In nearly every case, they raised not just their bar, but our bar for the kind of operational excellence YayPay brings.

I want to tell you about Revenue Heroes as we have seen them from our side of the account receivables (AR) automation story. In an ideal world, every single one of your customers would pay you on time, if not ahead of schedule. Unfortunately, it seldom works out that way. According to a recent study, the average business receives payments 22.5 days after they’re due. This causes nearly four out of five companies to invest more time in tracking down invoices. Making matters worse, 48 percent of businesses are forced to pay their own bills late because of cash flow problems caused by their customers paying late.

It’s precisely in this less-than-ideal world that Revenue Heroes come to save the day. They increase cash flow, reduce bad debt, save on borrowing cost, and grow the company. In 2019, it should no longer be necessary for us to convey the business case, the value, the imperative of modernizing AR. Like the mitochondria, it is, after all, the part of the business that makes revenue into something usable by the company. Without an optimized AR team supported by a modern toolkit, a company cannot operate effectively, nor be prepared for the larger changes in the workforce, the economy, and the ways of doing business that are already taking place.

So I sat down with these Revenue Heroes and asked them to tell me their perspective on their business, their industry, and the economy. Now we bring these stories to you. Tune in next week for our first of many features of our customer’s success stories, starting with Rob Castaneda from ServiceRocket.