Market Perspectives

Economic uncertainty has organizations focused on sustained, profitable growth. Ensuring profitability is more complex, however, with mixed-revenue models like subscriptions and usage-based offers. Omnichannel selling brings different costs, and margin is typically examined as a post-sale event when it’s too late to influence profit.

As with any deal, the subscription model requires decisions around quote and offer before the sale. Processes and technology must be in place to provide pricing guardrails without hindering business or forcing an uncompetitive offer. Today’s technology incorporates margin guidelines at the point of sale, supporting price discounts and revenue recognition implications as part of the quote and deal approval process. Ayara is part of a new class of revenue operations applications that work with existing configure, price and quote and opportunity management systems.

Ayara is a cloud software vendor specializing in unifying revenue operations. The software enables stakeholders across sales, product and finance departments to optimize profitability throughout the lead-to-cash cycle. It automates revenue recognition and other deal compliance guidelines at the point of sale, when deal desks and revenue operations teams typically rely on manual processes for a subset of opportunities. Unifying and automating revenue across departments enables a single source of truth throughout the revenue cycle. Organizations save time by cleaning and automating revenue data, which leads to more accurate revenue models and real-time analytics for faster decision-making and more closed won deals.

Ayara provides frictionless guardrails, allowing users to establish criteria around price, revenue and margin without complicating the selling process. The software analyzes transactions against these criteria and flags potential issues to help avoid unprofitable deals. Tools to manage the revenue process help prevent cash leakage and revenue loss. Every dollar matters – especially during an economic downturn – and this software uses best practices to enhance the revenue process. We believe that by 2026, 1 in 10 organizations will deploy a dedicated pricing application to analyze, create and operationalize optimized pricing to reduce leakage and maximize revenues.

Ayara pulls data from a customer resource management tool – most commonly Salesforce – as well as CPQ and enterprise resource planning systems. It boasts native integration with major providers of these systems and is available in Oracle Cloud Marketplace and Salesforce AppExchange. The software works with an organization’s existing platforms, providing a competitive edge and a glimpse into how businesses can enhance revenue processes from opportunity to close.

Ayara needs to reemphasize its value proposition to ensure organizations understand that this system works in conjunction with CPQ and ERP tools. While typical CPQ applications have comprehensive product configuration tools, they will not have the dynamic deal evaluation capabilities that Ayara provides. Ayara can help organizations realize that manual sampling of opportunity quotes by a deal desk is an outdated way to scrutinize transactions.

Business-to-business selling models are becoming more complex, forcing organizations to rethink the selling process. Buyers expect purchasing options that mimic the capabilities of business-to-consumer selling. Revenue organizations must adapt the selling experience to stay ahead of problems such as inefficient revenue execution and revenue leakage. Ayara, with its dynamic deal evaluation capabilities, should be included in evaluations for dedicated pricing applications.