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Revenue insights for teams beyond finance: Align signals with strategies
Revenue insights are the North Star representation of all teams' efforts. They strip away vanity metrics and show how much "customers" actually value your products and services. Naturally, every business generates these insights, but not all use them to the fullest.
According to 2024 global planning survey, 78% of finance decision makers admit their organization makes planning decisions based on assumptions. This shows that even with the data trying to talk, the decision makers often hear muffled noise and proceed to strategize using the incomplete data available at their disposal.
Teams often continue to scale old activities while the revenue insights indicate a need for pivot. Marketing goes back to thinking about creating more reach, MQLs, and SQLs; sales thinks about converting new leads; and customer success thinks about improving NPS. While these metrics are important and don't change a lot, the actions and priorities have to.
For example, in a given quarter, there is a huge spike in new customers and the churn is low, but profit margin is alarming. If the teams just return to increasing reach and closing deals without minding this signal, the organization loses ground over time, hindering growth.
This article explores how an enterprise team can leverage five revenue insights to align the upcoming plan with broader organizational goals.
- Revenue per segment analysis
- CLTV
- Churn
- Revenue concentration
- Aging analysis
1. Revenue per segment analysis
When revenue data is segmented based on location, industry, product line, and the like, they help teams work with laser-like focus on breaking the real hindrances.
Wrong focal areas
For example, segmenting revenue by industries and size can reveal many hidden insights such as product fit with the industry, sales cycle length, and renewal stability.
Let’s say you want to increase the revenue in the upcoming quarter. The marketing team suggests expanding in retail, because of a recent competitor initiative. Analysis shows that your product performs great within professional services, while retail is still in early adoption for your product, with lower renewal rates. If the teams continue on this opposed trajectory, revenue goals may fall short by the end of the quarter.
Who can fix it?
Market research and marketing team: As an initial step, they can mindfully leverage resources by doubling down on high-performing industries where traction is proven. As for retail, instead of being reactive, they can collaborate with sales and the product team to understand the internal gaps before planning initiatives.
Product team: They can evaluate whether the low adoption in retail stems from a genuine product-market gap and can rollout features and experiments, helping in stronger market entry.
2. Customer lifetime value (CLTV)
CLTV shows how much a customer throughout their journey has generated revenue to your business. It can signal many underlying factors and a few of them are
A missed opportunity in pricing and packaging
Let’s say you have an excellent offering and provide tiered plans. But your basic plan almost covers everything your major customer segment needs. The result: Nobody upgrades, nobody churns, leaving you grappling with a flat revenue graph and a low LTV.
Who can fix it?
RevOps and sales: These teams can come together to revamp pricing. Sales knows what customers frequently ask for, indicating monetizing features. RevOps can analyze past data and identify opportunities to better cap features in each plan.
Improper product-market fit
Like wanting to sell professional cameras to tourists, you might be targeting customers who don’t have a strong enough use case or budget for your solution. While this factor seems obvious, it happens way more often in B2B contexts where the targeting gets too broad or too narrow. In such cases, the customers use only a fraction of the product’s core capabilities. So even if they sign up, chances are lower they'll scale with you.
Who can fix it?
Marketing: The team can survey brand perception and product awareness to understand the current reality and tweak messaging or audience targeting.
Product and research: They can look into adding complementary features that benefit these customers and make them willing to pay more.
3. Churn
Churn, much like LTV, is a multifaceted signal. The key lies in decoding which part of it is the issue, because each demands a different response from different teams.
Misaligned messaging
When customers churn early or express disappointment, it’s worth examining whether expectations were mismanaged at the top of the funnel. Over-promising in marketing or sales collateral leads to customers feeling “sold to” rather than “served.”
Who can fix it?
Marketing: They can audit campaigns, ads, and onboarding content to ensure the promise matches the actual value delivery.
Sales enablement: They can refine their messaging play books to set realistic expectations that still excite prospects.
Product or UI changes
A sudden churn spike after new releases, redesigns, or pricing changes often points to product friction rather than customer disinterest. Users resist abrupt shifts, especially if workflows or familiar patterns are disrupted.
Who can fix it?
Product and CX teams: Both can monitor churn cohorts and analyze whether the issue lies in usability, communication, or lack of support. Depending on insights, they can either revert changes or reposition them through better in-app education and marketing.
External market forces
Sometimes churn may be driven by competitors, market conditions, and new regulations.
Who can fix it?
Competitive Intelligence and product marketing teams: Each can track competitor launches, pricing moves, and feature gaps. From there, teams can take defensive strategies (like temporary retention offers) or offensive product moves (to match evolving market expectations).
4. Revenue concentration
If a large portion of revenue comes from a small set of customers or a specific segment, the business becomes highly sensitive to market shifts, sector downturns, or decisions made by high-value clients. For enterprises, relying heavily on one region, one industry, or a handful of accounts can pose more risk than opportunity.
Highly niche (or) regional dependence
While niche solutions offer high authority on certain segments, to sustain, enterprises should branch out within the niche and diversify their revenue sources. A high reliance on customers from specific geographies often reflects an uneven go-to-market reach. While strong regional traction validates the product’s value in that market initially, it also signals the need to de-risk through expansion.
Who can fix it?
Marketing and growth teams: They can analyze regional opportunities and discover lookalike markets to begin with. Leadership can then allocate GTM resources through local partnerships, new pricing models, or region-specific campaigns.
Sales can also use this insight to calibrate focus once they start getting diverse leads in the pipeline.
5. Aging analysis of receivables
Aging receivables, besides helping with tracking overdue invoices, reveal much deeper insights into cash flow health, customer relationships, and operational discipline. Here’s how different signals from aging data can guide teams.
Chronic delays in payment
When certain customers consistently pay late, it often signals relationship strain or unclear payment terms. Lack of motivation to pay early makes on-time payments exceptions, directly impacting days sales outstanding (DSO) and cash flow agility.
Who can fix it?
Sales or account management: Either can flag these accounts early and build proactive engagement strategies, such as personal outreach, restructured payment cycles, or negotiated credit terms. Leadership and finance can design early-payment incentives like discounts or loyalty credits, stabilizing collections and building goodwill over time.
CS teams and legal teams can also work on reducing invoice disputes.
Recurring payment frictions
Repeated payment issues like failed transactions, invoice mismatches, or limited payment options, point to process friction rather than customer intent. Ignoring this erodes trust and can increase involuntary churn.
Who can fix it?
Product, CX, and operations teams can analyze payment journey data to remove friction, improve checkout UX, expand payment options, and tighten invoicing accuracy.
Revenue insights are only as valuable as the actions they inspire across the organization.
They are often seen as an artifact from the past rather than as a source of future planning for teams across the organization, not just finance. Every metric from LTV to aging analysis forms a narrative that can only be fully understood with different perspectives. When teams question each others' assumptions, the revenue engine starts to thrive, instead of just operating without fail. For enterprises, this means all teams read the same signals and align their strategies with them.
But the problem goes deeper. According to a report from Clari, 67% of enterprise leaders don’t even trust their revenue data.
The reason? Data is in silos, rendering them unreliable for decision-making. The natural beginning point for all these actions is a clear view of the unadulterated data, which only a comprehensive revenue management platform can offer.
Learn how Zoho Billing can help you turn your enterprise's revenue signal into next quarter's strategies.
