How Best-in-Class Sales Leaders Create Better Forecasts and Increase Revenue
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This document discusses how best-in-class sales leaders use analytics to improve sales forecasting and increase revenue. It provides insights from a webinar on using data and analytics to more accurately forecast pipeline and sales. Key takeaways include the importance of not relying solely on CRM for forecasting, empowering all employees with self-service analytics, and updating forecasts frequently. The document highlights benefits of accurate forecasting like focusing resources on most likely deals and understanding customers' needs. It also outlines how Birst can help companies achieve these benefits through advanced analytics, in-app experiences, and access to data from any source.
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How Best-in-Class Sales Leaders Create Better Forecasts and Increase Revenue
- 1. HOW BEST-IN-CLASS SALES LEADERS CREATE BETTER FORECASTS AND INCREASE REVENUE July 17, 2014 Enterprise-caliber Cloud BI
- 2. 2 FEATURED SPEAKERS Peter Ostrow VP and Research Group Director; Customer Management, Sales Effectiveness Aberdeen Farnaz Erfan Director, Product Strategy Birst
- 3. 3 WEBINAR NOTES Please send questions using the online interface Attendees muted upon entry
- 4. 4 AGENDA • How Best-in-Class Sales Leaders Use Analytics to Turn Better Forecasts into Increased Revenue • Why Birst for Sales Analytics? • Q & A
- 5. CHASING THE CRYSTAL BALL How Best-in-Class Sales Leaders Use Analytics to Turn Better Forecasts into Increased Revenue
- 6. 6 Takeaways Sales effectiveness requires more than rip-and- replace Willie Nelson was right all along Learn from your cookies Would a Vulcan make a good B2B salesperson? Don’t forget the ketchup
- 7. 7 Why we are here today
- 8. 8 Why we are here today
- 9. 9 What's keeping us awake at night?
- 10. 10 What's keeping us awake at night?
- 11. 11 Too often, the sales problem is a forecasting problem
- 12. 12 Too often, the sales problem is a forecasting problem 44% 36% 35% 34% 23% 15% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Insufficient data on current deals in the pipe entered by reps Over- confidence, “sand- bagging” Lack of manager enforcement of rep data entry Lack of reps' accountability Inability to understand probability deals to close Inability to weight deals by historical performance Percentageofrespondents n =144 All companies
- 13. 13 Too often, the sales problem is a forecasting problem
- 14. 14 Too often, the sales problem is a forecasting problem
- 15. 15 Can't we fix the forecast with better CRM adoption?
- 16. 16 Can't we fix the forecast with better CRM adoption?
- 17. 17 This is not sales enablement
- 19. 19 Enter the data scientists
- 20. 20 Best-in-Class Performance: Where do You Fit? Definition of Maturity Class Mean Class Performance Best-in-Class: Top 20% of aggregate performance scorers 94% of customer retention rate 13.2% year-over-year growth in average net client value; 75% showed improvement 11.6% year-over-year improvement in team attainment of sales quota; 69% showed improvement Industry Average: Middle 50% of aggregate performance scorers 81% of customer retention rate 1.0% year-over-year growth in average net client value; 23% showed improvement 0.3% year-over-year improvement in team attainment of sales quota; 26% showed improvement Laggard: Bottom 30% of aggregate performance scorers 19% of customer retention rate 1.9 % year-over-year decrease in average net client value; 8% showed improvement 0.7% year-over-year decrease in team attainment of sales quota; 20% showed improvement Blankb lank BlankblankBlankb lank
- 21. 21 Early adoption = smarter selling 88% 61% 41% 22% 77% 59% 38% 14% 10% 30% 50% 70% 90% Customer retention Reps achieving quota Lead acceptance rate Lead conversion rate PercentageofAttainment n =261 Data analytics applied to deal velocity All others
- 22. 22 Aren't these tools just for geeked-out managers? 64% 56% 48%47% 52% 38% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% Employees with need, desire for analytical functionality, with access to BI Employees using analytics in a self- service capacity Users engaged with analytical tools on a weekly or more frequent basis PercentageofRespondents n =83 Leaders Followers
- 23. 23 …Not if you can achieve results like these 60% 60% 56% 44% 38% 47% 30% 40% 50% 60% Speed of decision- making Trust in underlying data Reduction in response time to customer requests / inquiries Percentageindicating4/5on1-5 scale n =83 Leaders Followers
- 24. 24 How does this stuff work?
- 25. 25 How does this stuff work?
- 26. 26 How does this stuff work?
- 27. 27 What should I be doing?
- 28. 28 Does forecasting accuracy matter?
- 29. 29 What benefits will a more accurate forecast accrue? 61% 61% 45% 33% 46% 42% 33% 28% 45% 25% 22% 21% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% Using forecasting process to add extra resources to deals most likely to close Understanding which opportunities are most/ least likely to close Using forecasting process to “walk away”from deals least likely to close Using forecasting process to identify potential “no decisions” Percentindicating4/5ona1-5scale n =139 Best-in-Class Industry Average Laggard
- 30. 30 What benefits will a more accurate forecast accrue? 83% 78% 55% 50% 59% 40% 32% 25% 10% 30% 50% 70% 90% Understanding customers' business challenges Retaining top sales talent Sales forecast perceived as accurate/ trustworthy by sr. management, entire company Sales leaders use forecasting process to coach reps Percentindicating4/5ona1-5 scale n = 139 Best-in-Class All others
- 31. 31 What should I be doing? 39% 56% 6% 17% 60% 22% 0% 15% 30% 45% 60% On-demand, always available in real-time; no need to actually “publish”a forecast Daily to monthly Quarterly or less often PercentageofRespondents n =139 Best-in-Class All others
- 32. 32 Never forget who's in charge
- 33. 33 What's in YOUR pipeline? 13% 38% 31% 7% 22% 36% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% We are a dominant provider in our market and have achieved full penetration of almost all our accounts We have very strong penetration in most of our accounts but could still benefit from additional up-sell or cross-sell revenue We have reasonable account penetration but are definitely “leaving money on the table” PercentageofRespondents n = 104 Best-in-Class All Others
- 34. 34 Don't be that guy.
- 35. 35 Don't be that guy.
- 37. 37 Are we consuming or creating? 180 22% 27% 8% 14% 24% 28% 34% 17% 9% 7% 30% 50% 11% 6% 0% 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% Remote sales activity=content consumption, i.e. seeing but rarely/ never changing/ entering data Occasionally manipulates data on prospects/ customers/proposals remotely, mostly waits for full lap/ desktop to change/ enter data Remote sellers equally “see” and “do”on remote devices Frequently manipulates data on prospects/ customers/proposals remotely, still reserves activity for office/home Location/device is irrelevant; reps can perform virtuall/all work via tablet or smartphone PercentageofRespondents n =246 Best-in-Class Industry Average Laggard
- 38. 38 Takeaways Sales effectiveness requires more than rip-and- replace Willie Nelson was right all along Learn from your cookies Would a Vulcan make a good B2B salesperson? Don’t forget the ketchup
- 39. THANK YOU For more information on this and other topics, please visit aberdeen.com Peter.ostrow@aberdeen.com https://twitter.com/#!/peterostrow http://www.linkedin.com/in/ostrowpeter/
- 40. WHY BIRST FOR SALES ANALYTICS? Enterprise-caliber Cloud BI
- 41. 41 ADVANCED ANALYTICS FOR BEST-IN-CLASS SALES LEADERS • Pipeline Growth & Velocity • Sales Performance & Win Rates • Sales Forecasting & Predictions – E.g. Likelihood of deals that would close • Exception Alerts – E.g. Deals that exceeded benchmarks for x many days – Missed step in the sales process – A stage 5 deal that is missing a contract – Opportunities without NDAs
- 42. 42 IN-APP EXPERIENCE, EMBEDDING ANALYTICS INSIDE SALESFORCE • Higher adoption • Better user experience
- 43. 43 ACCESS TO ANY INFORMATION, FOR ALL USERS • Complete view of customer – Data from …. – E.g. Leads generated from social media vs. sales-outbound • Analytics on mobile for traveling sales reps • All users, one data! – Others who are not Salesforce users – E.g. Members of Finance, Operations, Support, Partners, etc. without a SFDC user license & more…
- 44. 44 Data Sources BUILD A DATA-DRIVEN SALES ORGANIZATION Challenges – Outlook: forecast, quota, actual, predicated performance on 800+ sales reps – Sales and product combined reporting and analytics – Team performance on constantly changing territories Results – Sales performance ranking of reps, teams and regions on monthly, quarterly, and yearly basis – not possible within Salesforce – 800 sales professionals | 1 forecast – Sales management: saved ½ day a week – TTV: 83 days Why Birst? – Multi-source analysis across Salesforce (sales data), SQL Server and Cognos TM1 (product data) – Automatic detection of changing dimensions such as changing territories – Pixel-perfect reporting with security rules already defined in Salesforce “Earlier at D&B, we tried to build exec-level dashboards and we never achieved this success.” Ted Mastalski Leader of Global Solutions
- 45. 45 Data Sources WIN CUSTOMERS BY PERSONALIZING PRODUCT RECOMMENDATION Challenges – Identifying growth opportunities with existing clients – Empowering advisors to manage their businesses effectively – Large volumes of historic data, but no insight Results – Predictive analytics to identify hidden opportunities. E.g. client with $2M in assets and no retirement plan – 2500 financial advisors using Birst make data-driven product recommendations to sell the right products to the right clients – Brokers with Birst gathered 2X more assets than other brokers Why Birst? – Speed of Deployment – Ease of use – Scalability Commission Data Back Office Operational Data “Advisors using the tool are bringing in new assets at twice the rate of those who are not using it.” Catie Tobin Head of Business Development
- 46. 46 Data Sources MASTER LEAD-TO-CASH TO DRIVE PROFITABILITY Challenges – Drive profitability by converting leads / trials faster – Increase sales rep productivity – Get faster insights to pipeline than manual reporting Results – Real time pipeline analysis – understanding usage, frequency and completed activities of trial accounts – Reduce sales cycles – Increase deal close rate Why Birst? – To go live quickly with a cloud deployment – Self-service dashboards & mobile access – Lead-to-cash across Marketo, Salesforce & Netsuite – Customer-focused culture of Birst “When we looked at the ease with which various BI solutions allow business users to construct, maintain, and add new sources to a data model, Birst blew everything else out of the water.” Monique Herman VP Business Operations (Future)
- 47. 47 Data Sources IDENTIFY TOP SALES MANAGERS TO RAPIDLY GROW A BUSINESS Challenges – Grow sales org rapidly by identifying top performing sales managers who can train new reps – Understand customer lifetime value to determine where to focus marketing and sales efforts – Quickly resolve pipeline bottlenecks Results – Analysis of best market segments & customers who would buy multiple time vs. once – Pipeline analysis to understand whether bottlenecks are customer, product, rep or region related – Revenue growth: 83% – TTV: 39 days Why Birst? – Salesforce solution accelerator – Analytic snapshots on Salesforce “For about the same amount of time we were idle with the previous analytic tool, we found ourselves actually up and running with Birst” Lori Bush President & CEO
- 48. 48 Q&A
- 49. 49 LEARN MORE • Download 2014 WOC Report – Birst.com/wisdom2014 • Join us for a Live Demo – Every Tues and Thurs @ 11:00 am PT/2:00 pm ET – birst.com/livedemo • Contact us – info@birst.com – (866) 940-1496 (or +1 415-766-4800)
- 50. 50 THANKS
Editor's Notes
- Dunn and Bradstreet provides data services, helping companies to better market to and understand their customers. They have over 800 folks in sales that are helping companies better manage data about companies, from credit risk, to financials, to marketing lists. As a data company – they are keen on making data driven decisions. They have hundreds of reports that each sales manager /sales ops team would have to assemble each week from salesforce.com. These reports never matched up with the reports about product performance which came from a SQL server database and TM1 cube. With hundreds of thousands of customers, ever growing selection of products, and growing sales force – the executive team could barely get on same page on where to focus energy. The head of sales had no visibility into whether or not he would make his number until the quarter was virtually over. They tried other solutions. They were using BOBJ (Crystal) for the highly manual reporting process and tried to use Cloud9 for SFDC analytics to get pipeline visibility. However – none of these gave them what they needed. Sales Management wanted to know – “based on all of this data and historical performance, what is likelihood I will hit my number? and on what products and sales reps should I focus my energy to ensure I do hit my number?” They called this – their Outlook – and they were flying blind without. The VP Sales needed a solution. Business need: Outlook: What they had before Birst was simply a pipeline analysis from SFDC. A separate spreadsheet with Quota – that they could only literally eye-ball based on rep to see where they were at. They also add actual orders from ERP system – and they never matched what was supposedly closed in SFDC. It was a disconserting feeling for VP of Sales. What they want to do: Take current forecast from SFDC, quota/target from spreadsheet, actual from SQL server (ERP), and historical performance TM1 and salesforce.com – and tell sales management – based on historical performance of pipeline and products – where will I end up (predicted) at end of quarter. And which deals had best chance of closing and which ones had worse chance. Do this over hundreds of thousands of deals, over hundreds of products, and 800+ sales folks. Technology: First, they needed to capture snapshots of pipeline from salesforce.com to see exactly how deals progress so they could get model. Second, they need to match this with orders from SQL server and with product information from TM1 (conforming dimensions) to get actuals. And then do this over dimensions that were constantly changing (slowly changing dimensions) to ensure proper prediction was being done. This sounds hard – and it is – but Birst does this automatically – so that the business user with automated warehousing, conforming dimensions, and snapshots – all being part of the standard solution. Now they literally apply past performance statistics against current pipeline – know exactly where they stand from closed deals (from the General Ledger) and know exactly where to focus energy – and the liklihood of hitting their number. This has given them ability to it number 6 consecutive quarters. The technology terms are not important. This is a complex problem and you need solid technology to solve this isseus, they cannot be solved with simple solutions, D&B had tried them. Birst was only one that delivered. Business need: D&B is data driven company. Executive commonly poor through many reports and require them to be in a very specific format. Sales management and ops was spending countless hours creating and manipulating these reports every week for executives. The reports had to meet a very specific format and be sent out to large number of people. They also had to include data from at least 3 different sources. Technology solution: Birst’s pixel perfect reporting, with scheduling, user data security/permissions that came directly from Salesforce.com. They could create single report and re-use it over and over again. Since Birst security flows directly from SFDC– they don’t have to maintain two different places and they know the wrong data won’t end in the wrong person’s report. Furthermore – the reporting sits on Birst’s data warehouse –they did not have to bring together data from multiple different systems. That was already being done with Birst, - including conforming the dimension, so there was only one customer, one product, etc… This reporting deployment saved their sales management and ops teams 10% of time each week – so they could focus on closing deals and hitting their numbers. Business need: As a data and performance driven company, D&B constantly ranked the performance of sales reps, teams, and regions. They wanted to do this every month, quarter, and year. However – with SFDC – they could only show the most recent month. Why? Because sales teams change all the time. Example: Jim was in the west in Q1 and his performance rolled up to the west in that quarter. In Q2, he moved to Southwest. His performance rolls up to Southwest now. However – if you are looking at Q1 performance, he should appear in West – while his performance should roll up to Southwest in Q2. Technology solution: Birst handles this automatically. It’s not just for sales hirearchies too. It’s any dimensions that rolls up, like customers, products, regions. Only a warehouse can handle this properely. Now D&B knows they have accurate view of most recent month performance rolled all the way up – but also across all of history – so they can review trends AND accurately award and recognize regions and teams that are the true top performers. Summary: Bringing together all of this data to run a sales organization should not be that hard. Reality is that the data manipulation and handling can be a complex, but reason that D&B chose Birst is because we autmoate much of that hard technical parts. We handle the easy and HARD use cases. D&B could roll this out without IT and not worry about the technical meaning of a sclowly changing dimension or automated warehousing. Reports are automatically generated and only contain data based on user security from SFDC. Team performance accurately reflects who was on that team in which time periods. Others could not not do it (Cloud9 / BOBJ) – What does this mean? The Sales team is out selling. The head of reporting said, this is the most productive they have been in 27 years. Translated to reality – the Sales Mgmt team has such great visibility and command over their sales pipeline, orders, and inbound leads. That means the VP of Sales has 1 forecast number – 1 commitment – despite having over 800 sales professionals. **************************************************** Ted Mastalski – Analyst, Reporting Leader – was key part of evaluation and led the selection project
- The more productive financial consultants are, the more revenue they bring in, the more profit the firm will have
- A rapidly growing software company in the mid-market, Jive sells collaboration software to companies who want to have active customer-centric communities, support and service teams. Jive – like any other SaaS business provides a free trial of their software. The trial drives most of their leads, but it was somewhat of a black box. Trial can be a great source but if you don’t have the usage analytics, you don’t know if your leads are engage / not. They wanted their sales reps to have access to those insights – so they can close more business. Jive built Birst’s dashboards into Salesforce.com to track the number of times and frequency with which a prospect has logged into a trial account, as well as the activities they completed. Sales reps can now decide which prospects to pursue first, and engage much more deeply during the sales process. And to close the loop on its sales analysis, Jive wanted to use Birst to analyze how many of those trials become customers. So now they are using Birst to see the full lead-to-cash insight – from leads in Marketo, to opportunities in Salesforce.com, and revenue in Netsuite. Why Birst? Multi-source analytics and conforming dimensions across different sources (a lead n Marketo becomes an opportunity in SFDC and eventually a customer in NetSuite – they are the same person but their definitions don’t match across 3 different systems). From an organization stand point, this would help them get alignment. Birst helps them ensure than when the VP of sales says that I sold 3.5M in the last month and 30 % of the leads were source outside of marketing, the Head of Marketing and the Head of Finance agree – and not say: “not so in my book”.
- Rodan and Fields, founded by dermatologist, is a direct sales pharmaceutical organization – focused on getting ant-aging products to end consumers. Their CFO and VP of Sales knew that they had found a market niche, and could grow rapidly, if they could focus their resources properly. However, they were growth constrained by how quickly and who they could hire to sell their solution directly – and which managers were the best managers to train up the new reps. They also wanted to better understand the market - know more about the best segment where they could get best sales, which customers would buy multiple products vs just one. They had reports from salesforce.com and finance application, but that was not going to drive the business – they were simply static reports. The CFO and VP of sales needed a solution Business need: hire and train sales folks for top performance. They had top performing sales reps, but SFDC just told them who they were…not how to emulate them or what characteristics they had, or which managers should get new headcount. Truly analyzing and understanding sales performance with a rapidly growing organization is hard because as org changes – you can’t accurately compare past to current across sales managers. For example – if analyzing first half year performance - one manager had 3 reps and had a higher achievement than another manager who had 4 reps it’s may sound straight forward. However – what if the one who had 3 reps in Q1, actually hired on 3 more – who became productive in Q2. And the one with 4 hired on 1 more in Q2. Then how do you decide? This is complex – and metrics need to be tied to dimensions at a point in time – not only as it stands now. Furthermore – if data for these metrics is in different data sources (SQL server, great plains financials, SFDC)… how do you get accurate view? Technology Solution: Need to tie together information about the performance and rep from multiple sources – Create conforming dimensions – that are also slowly changing dimensions (to handle those hiring situations) – and tie together customers (to match orders and opportunities) - this sounds hard. With Birst – it’s done with something called automated warehousing. It takes the hard – and necessary data manipulations – and automates it so that business users can set up the application. Now with this Rodan and Fields – has a true accurate view of best performing sales managers – and can properly determine which managers hire faster, which ones to emulate, and best ways to train new folks Challenge: Need to determine which customers drive highest customer lifetime value – with continuous and multiple product purchases – and then target similar customers. Solution: They did this by pulling data from ERP system – Great Plains (orders) matching it with data from flat files about the market, and data from salesforce.com about customers – to perform a customer lifetime value analysis – and determine an ideal customer as make up. This required a data warehouse to bring in historical data, current data, and constantly changing data. What does this mean – bringing together data from multiple sources, is not as simple as it may sound, matching dimension names, ensuring hierarchies are correct. It’s not really relevant except that if not done right or poorly the business cannot achieve their goal. Without Birst, Rodan & Fields could not determine who the right customer was for targeting – they could not grow their business as they wanted. Challenge: salesforce.com historical pipeline aging. Part of driving to better sales performance – is understanding where new sales get stuck in pipeline. Solution: This can only be accomplished with snapshot capability – which is not available in SFDC –but is available in Birst. In fact, it is included in SFDC solution accelerator. This accelerator helped R&F deploy much quicker and get up and running fast – while delivering needed snapshot analysis. Use Case: They need to know where/what/why deals are being stuck at different points in pipeline. SFDC cannot provide this. They needed to understand where the bottlenecks were in pipeline – to see if those bottlenecks were customer, product, rep, or region related. This required deeper analysis than just a snapshot. It required confoirming dimensions with salesforce snapshotting. . Technology Solution: Birst provides this with snapshots at a very low level of granularity on each oppty. For Rodan and Fields it was deployed rapidly with the pre-built Salesforce.com Solution Accelerator – that comes with pipeline snapshots. Furthermore – these snapshots were tied to dimensions from data not in SFDC, that allowed them to understand why deals were getting stuck at different stages – and then implement changes to prevent that in future. What does all this mean? Pulling data from multiple sources, taking snapshots, matching rep performance in rapidly changing organization – and many technical terms. It is a lot of stuff, and it is a little complex behind the scenes, and that is why R&F chose Birst. With Birst, we handled the technical hard data stuff, and gave them ability to analyze their business. They focus on what they do best, analyze the business and make decisions based on correct analysis and data to drive 83% revenue growth. Yes -83% revenue growth!! That can only be achieved if you have very well focused your sales efforts on a specific segment with a product set that uniquely meets their needs – and hire on reps that are uniquely qualified to sell into this segment. They have achieved this through market and sales analysis in Birst. ******************* Sr. Director of BI led the evaluation