Vena expands beyond its corporate performance management software base with a new offering that addresses a key customer pain point, and which the company believes will significantly increase their bottom line.
Toronto-based Vena Solutions, which makes corporate performance management [CPM] software that leverages Excel, has added a new solution to their repertoire, which is now in beta, and slated for general availability in the new year. Their new Revenue Performance Management [RPM] offering is designed to help companies allocate resources to maximize revenues, profitability and business growth. Aimed at SaaS and subscription-based businesses, it is sold as a separate solution, and is not part of their CPM offering.
“RPM is a more holistic way to look at a business as it relates to the elements of revenue performance – sales, marketing, finance, and customer care,” said Don Mal, Vena’s CEO. “Being able to look at and assess these factors lets you plan and report on a continuum against things that impact on revenue generation continuum. It’s an agile way to model revenue performance, using Vena’s traditional platform functionality.”
Mal said that the RPM functionality leverages the capabilities that are already in Excel, along with Vena’s integrations into other software.
“The value comes from the way that we apply the software to the problem,” he said. “We have added pre-built templates to support the management process as well as personalized dashboards.”
These provide both top-level and drill-down views of insights from previously disparate sources – including Salesforce CRM, FinancialForce ERP, web analytics, marketing automation, customer support and general ledger systems.
Don Mal, Vena Solutions’ CEO
“Our key value proposition is the same as with our CPM solution,” Mal said. “We leverage online Excel as grid technology on top of a well-defined process. We use technology that people already know and love and make it better for this use case, with our proven integrations with marketing and sales automation tools.”
In their core CPM market, Vena competes primarily against companies their size or smaller. In RPM, they will encounter larger players as well, like SAP SuccessFactors and Oracle. Mal thinks that Vena is still well positioned, however.
“We think we provide a more holistic view of RPM, which differentiates us in this space,” he said. “Other players can’t capture the breadth of marketing analytics, sales execution, finance data and customer care information like Net Promoter scores. We are flexible enough to capture all that. None of the other software solutions provide the full level of detail you can get from spreadsheets.”
Mal indicated that while Vena targets both the enterprise and the midmarket in CPM, their RPM offering is aimed more at the midmarket.
“We initially are focused more on SaaS and subscription-based companies with this,” he said. “A lot of those SaaS companies are our sweet spot, and will let us go at the midmarket hard. It’s a bigger total addressable market. They are using spreadsheets to try and do this today, and are struggling. We can give them an effective way to deal with their problems.”
Mal said that a key reason for moving into the RPM space is that these midmarket customers not only are flustered by their challenges, but will spend money to deal with them.
“Customers are willing to spend more money on RPM than on budgeting and planning,” he said. “It’s a high value segment that we believe will accelerate our business beyond our current growth rate. We think that RPM will definitely add more RPM [Revolutions Per Minute] to Vena!”
Vena RPM is currently available in beta, with general availability planned for Q1 2018. Customers can join the beta program at https://venasolutions.com/try-vena/
