RiOS vs CRM

A CRM is the system in which your team records customers, touchpoints, deals and the pipeline. RiOS is a revenue intelligence platform that reads that CRM, puts it next to your billing, support and advertising systems, and flags where revenue is leaking, with an amount attached. RiOS does not replace your CRM, nor does it become a second CRM alongside it. The CRM remains the place where sales works. RiOS looks beyond the boundaries of that CRM, at what happens to the deal afterwards.

What does a CRM do?

Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive: a CRM is built to organise selling. It tracks who your customers are, who was in contact, which deals are open, what stage they are in and what the expected value is. Set up well, it gives a sales manager control over the pipeline and an account manager an overview of their customers.

A CRM stops roughly where the deal is won. What happens next, the order, the contract, the invoice, the payment, the renewal, usually lives in other systems: an ERP, an accounting package such as Xero, NetSuite, Exact or AFAS, a project administration. Some CRMs have invoicing modules or integrations, but in most B2B companies with EUR 2M to EUR 50M in revenue, the accounts are the source for invoiced revenue, not the CRM.

That is where the problem lies. The CRM says "won, EUR 48,000". The accounts say "invoiced, EUR 41,500". Both systems do what they should. Nobody puts them side by side. Why those two figures are almost never the same is explained in why CRM data is not the same as financial data.

What does RiOS do?

RiOS is a platform, currently in beta, that connects to the systems you already use: CRM (such as HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive), billing (such as Stripe, Exact and SAP), support and advertising platforms. It reads those systems continuously, links deals, invoices, tickets and campaigns together, and does four things with them:

1. Read. Read-only access wherever possible. RiOS keeps no version of the truth of its own; your own systems remain the source.
2. Connect. A won deal is linked to the invoice that belongs to it, a customer to their tickets and their payment behaviour.
3. Price. Every finding gets an amount in euros and a level of certainty.
4. Propose. Each finding comes with a proposed fix and, where possible, an automation ready to run. Writing back to your CRM only happens after approval.

An example of such a finding: a deal that has been marked won for six weeks with no invoice behind it. Or a customer who is "active" according to the CRM while their orders in billing have been falling for three months. The CRM sees the first half of that story, the accounts the second. RiOS puts them together.

The difference side by side

Where your CRM stops

Four kinds of leak that cannot be seen in a CRM on its own, because the other half of the information lives elsewhere:

• Won without an invoice. The deal is marked won, the invoice was never created or only much later. See CRM-to-billing reconciliation explained for how to check this by hand.
• A different price on the invoice than in the deal. A discount given during negotiation that is not in the CRM, or the other way round: a price in the CRM that was never applied on the invoice.
• Silent contraction. The customer is a healthy account in the CRM. Billing shows they buy less every quarter. Because nobody sees the two side by side, the account manager only calls when the cancellation arrives.
• Service that costs the renewal. A large account with slow support tickets. Support sees a queue, sales sees a renewal in four months. Together it is a revenue risk.

The CRM can do nothing about this. It was not made to read invoices or to link support tickets to contract value.

Can you not just build this in your CRM?

Up to a point, yes. You can write billing data back to the CRM, add an "invoiced amount" field and build a report of deals where that field is empty. Many companies do. It works as long as:

• the integration between the accounts and the CRM keeps running without errors;
• each deal has exactly one invoice, or you model the relationship between deals and multiple invoices properly;
• someone looks at the report every week and acts on it;
• you do not also want to bring in support, usage or advertising data.

In practice it breaks down on the second and third points. Partial invoices, additional work, contracts with a term and credit notes make the link messy. And a report nobody opens finds nothing. A platform that makes the comparison across systems, gives each finding an owner and keeps following it up until it is resolved does, in effect, the work that would otherwise take half a job. More on that trade-off in do I need Revenue Intelligence if I already have a CRM?.

Worked example: what a CRM report misses

Worked example: suppose a software company with EUR 5M in revenue and 180 won deals a year. It has a CRM report that shows deals without an invoice number. That report finds three a year. Sounds good.

What the report does not find:

• 11 deals where an invoice number has been filled in, but the invoiced amount is lower than the deal value, on average EUR 2,400 per deal: EUR 26,400.
• 6 customers on a usage-based contract who exceed their bundle without the excess being invoiced, on average EUR 3,000 a year: EUR 18,000.
• 4 contracts with annual indexation that was not applied, on average EUR 1,800: EUR 7,200.

Together EUR 51,600 a year, around 1 percent of revenue. The CRM report sees none of it, because it only checks whether a field is filled in. The amounts are fictitious, the pattern is not: a check on "is there an invoice" finds far less than a check on "is the invoice right".

Checklist: what your CRM does not tell you

Put these questions on paper on Monday and see which ones you can answer from your CRM:

1. How many of the deals won last quarter have been invoiced in full?
2. Which customers pay something different from what is in the deal?
3. Which customers are buying less this year than last?
4. Which contracts expire within six months, and which of those have an open support issue?
5. Which won deals had their first invoice sent more than 30 days after the win?

If you cannot answer two or more without an export from another system, you have a gap between the CRM and the rest of your revenue chain. That gap is exactly what Revenue Intelligence exists for. The wider comparison between categories of software is in Revenue Intelligence vs Business Intelligence, and the general version of this comparison in Revenue Intelligence vs CRM.

How RiOS and your CRM work together

RiOS is built to work on top of the CRM you already have. A few principles:

• Your CRM remains the source of truth for sales. RiOS does not replace it and migrates nothing.
• Where possible, RiOS only reads. A fix that writes back, for example a task on a deal or an updated field, only happens after approval.
• Findings become tasks with an owner, a status and the euro amount behind them.
• Pricing is per company, not per user, so finance and operations can look in too without extra licences.

What the screens look like, with example data, is shown on the page about the system.

Frequently asked questions

Does RiOS replace my CRM?

No. RiOS reads your CRM and puts it next to other systems. Sales keeps working in the CRM. If you stop using RiOS, nothing has to be migrated back, because your CRM had everything all along.

Do I need a well-configured CRM before RiOS delivers anything?

A CRM with gaps produces less precise findings, but those gaps are findings too. Duplicate accounts, deals without an amount or without a close date surface as a data quality problem, with what it costs.

Which CRMs does RiOS connect to?

HubSpot, Salesforce and Pipedrive are named. Almost any system with an API can be connected. If your CRM is not among them, ask.

Does RiOS write to my CRM?

Only after approval. The starting point is read access. An automation that puts something in your CRM, such as a task or a follow-up, only runs once you have switched it on.

Is a CRM dashboard not enough?

For managing the pipeline, yes. For revenue leakage, no, because the CRM does not see billing, usage or the support side. Most leaks arise after the moment a deal is marked won.