Consumption-based, aka usage-based, pricing is hardly new. Anyone with an electricity, gas, or water bill knows that the amount you pay each month varies depending on your usage. More recently, disruptive companies have pushed other industries (transportation, hospitality, communications, and insurance) to transform by providing usage-based products and services via software applications. As consumers, we see this all around us, when we hail an Uber or choose a short-term rental on AirBnB.

Account-based marketing, or ABM, is more often used as targeted demand generation—not one-to-one marketing. In a 2020 study of more than 300 organizations worldwide, Forrester found that “a significant number of respondents claimed they were using an ABM approach but weren’t doing what we would consider the basics of ABM, such as working with sales.”1 ABM isn’t just about assigning one siloed team the responsibility of targeting and revealing high-potential prospects.

Corporate finance must change. Across industries, an organization’s Finance team should shed light on what’s happening today with revenue and other financial indicators, while also predicting what the future may hold. And they must do the same for the entire organization. Until recently, it would have been impossible to meet these expectations. Excel-driven forecasting requires herculean efforts to wrangle data and report numbers by the end of each quarter.