Sales forecast automation for sport organisations

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welcome to this exactly forecasting session on how exactly uses exactly forecasting how we use it to drive clean healthy sufficient pipeline how we use it to grow our business and be predictable in our forecast but that's not the only thing that we do with exactly forecasting so today i'm going to show you exactly how exactly uses exactly forecasting um to do all of those things so throughout this presentation i will be playing the role of jamie anderson who is our chief revenue officer and i'll show you the challenges that he faces uh his overall goals and how he uses the tool on a day-to-day basis so the challenge that jamie faces as a chief revenue officer um and that all sales leaders face is kind of two-fold it's the sales leaders have low confidence in their forecasts so only 55 percent uh you know 45 have high high confidence 55 percent have low confidence in their forecast and you know by 2025 sales leaders will rely on intuition bias so it's kind of this white knuckling approach of let's just hope that we're good for the number that we've been given and that we're calling and this is all supported by gartner so you know the way that jamie grows our business and the way that he manages the sales organization is that we all need to remove our rose tinted classes we have to base things on reality on what is really in the pipeline what's really happening you know what should we be committing what's in the different stages we need to understand what is our realistic growth potential let's not just make up numbers and then hope for them we need to back them up with activity with pipeline with accounts we need to drive accountability you know sales rep by sales rep sales team by sales team geo by geo we need to make sure we don't have twenty percent of the reps doing eighty percent of our number or eighty percent of the reps doing twenty percent of the number and we have to make sure that we're getting people productive as quickly as possible we don't lose people in their first you know three or four quarters because they're not being you know supported in the ways that they should be so the way that jamie uses exactly forecasting and the way that our sales leaders use it throughout the organization is we use it to understand what is the position is to have empathy is to understand where sellers are is to inspect the pipeline that they've got to understand what is the risk and what is the upside and knowing the difference between the two and what to focus on is to look at individual teams um and the individuals within those teams and you can do that from jamie's level all the way down to individual reps so it's never been easier to understand exactly what they're going through and then we can understand where should we focus on in terms of sellers geos teams products pipeline teams and we can drive accountability ingly you know long gone are the days where you know sales leaders just have to shout and screen and ask for everything no we can be very tailored and very specific in what we're asking for so what i'm going to demo to you today is i'm going to go into the software itself i've kind of put it in slides to keep it all nice and a polished experience for you guys but this is all live and production software we're going to go through three areas how do i as a revenue leader know my business how do i know the pipeline and how do i know the individuals within it so i'm logged into exactly forecasting now this is demo data so please do not try and work out everything about our business based on it but here we've got you know what is the state of jamie anderson's business in q2 uh so we're beginning at q2 we can see that you know we've won uh about 27 million against a quarter of 3. 35 million we've got about 8 million gap and we can see that you know in terms of the pipeline we've got a good amount of pipeline here we've only got 10 million gap to fill so we've got a huge amount of coverage there and we can understand you know what is my commit and then what is the manager commit and what's the ai predicting that we're going to close based on all of the historical trends so right now you'll see this this flat line it's almost like the patient is dead here we're looking at the future pipeline contribution and you know this is the way that jamie really starts his day he looks at this view and the view here is it's filtering to take off any future pipeline contribution we just want to look at you know what is based on what we've got in the pipeline today nothing new will come in how do we need to execute but you know and this is this is tailored to our business but you can change anything on the screen so it's configured to your business but you know i want to then look at you know what could come in um within the rest of the quarter so we know based on historical trends that uh we've generated 7.25 million in quota and closed uh 2.9 um in terms of overall attainment with the rest of time that we've got so you know we still have the ability to impact this quarter based on pipeline efforts and we can see that you know what that will look like over time but if jamie i want to you know i know where i am i know my position i've got these numbers memories but i want to look at individual teams i want to drill down and understand how are they doing how are they performing so i can see each of my teams each of my direct reports what is their position i can understand where things are looking risky but i can also look into individual deals and this is where you know i as genie would never be able to do this in crm but i can see looking at all of the deals um under chris stewart so i'm now looking at chris stewart's level of the hierarchy so chris stewart is our emea leader so i can see all the deals that he's got in his pipeline and i can see in the ops amount i can see how much chris is calling and in custom reporting it's how much i jamie i'm overriding those so there's some pieces where you know i just i just don't believe the same thing that the chris does see well you can see that you know so so henley and co you know it's been zero down so we obviously don't think this is going to happen even though it's in stage five we can see that we've got some things here you know so we've got the stage two opportunity that's that's too early to call and we've actually you know adjusted individual amounts here so it's being able to have that roll up throughout the organization being able to hedge and get full transparency into what's happening in each of these deals all wrapped around with a health score which is tailored based on your business's previous performance and what deals look like for you so we can completely understand you know what our business looks like how we should be forecasting how we should be supporting and you know at any point we can navigate into different levels of the hierarchy it's all just point and click here but we want to see you know how is the pipeline moved so going into our flow lytics we can see you know what has where do we start where do we end and what is the changes that have have happened in the last in this case in that have had activity in the last 90 days you can see that some things are advancing some are progressing and some are just staying the same which can be okay but it could be that it's stagnating you know we can see that we've got certain things which have been pushed out we might want to interrogate that and we can do we can click on it and just drill into it so i know that jamie has he won't mind me saying this you know he has of a sunday evening been looking to see has there been activity in the last week what's been pushed out under the radar by stealth between the the regional um forecast calls and then the global forecast calls so he's able to go and get full transparency into this and this is the view that rexy the manager see that jamie sees so there's nowhere to hide and he can see everything and how it's moving so for the paranoid revenue leader of course jamie isn't if he's listening to this um but it allows him to ask and answer these questions incredibly quickly we can see you know how much pipeline have we got are we in a good spot is it moving because that's what keeps revenue leaders up at night it's what are my sellers doing what are the changes that are happening and it could be that you know i want to filter this by what's happening in the last seven days so if this stage was true and you know there's 118 opportunities which haven't moved that's what i need to start you know holding my sales leaders accountable and saying you know what are your teams doing and we can filter by um you know how things are changing so have thing are there ops which have been pushed multiple times uh which in this quarter so if an opportunity has been pushed three or more times the chances are it could be pushed again so maybe it's not a real deal so we can completely dive into this and segment this how we want to so if we just want to look at you know deals where we're selling a particular product like exactly forecasting we can do that because this is all wrapped around the data which sits within your crm and within your business so maybe we want to go in to look at you know what the individual deals which support this so i can go into our pipeline view i can see all of the deals which are organized by category we can change this so it's organized by stage as an example so here we can see all the different stages and you know for our business it would be if it's closed it's closed closed pending is it's just about to close stage five it's probably about 80 chance it's going to close stage four is about 50 50 and then stage three it's probably you know a one in three sort of chance and if it's discovered it's very early tours and again remember this is data so please don't read into it too much but you know we can understand where the deals are where there's movement there's alerts which are telling uh both jamie and the individual sales people where they should be focusing so you can see here these deals are looking pretty healthy but as you scroll down here the deals get less healthy and that's where we might need to say you know do we need to do a deal reviews an example we've got a 1.2 million deal here and the close date's being pushed out maybe that requires some attention and we can filter that down so we can look at individual sales people so looking at you know if i want to put myself in the shoes of charlotte i can see that she's got one close pending deal and she's got four which are um you know in this kind of 50 50 stage so maybe she needs a little bit of help and i can look into and i can see individual deals and what the scoring is so i can see here that you know we are targeting the right sort of customer um they're a b tier for us so we're pulling in sixth sense data we can pull in all of our data from marketing automation from chorus from what's happening in your emails and your calendars but you know we're seeing that you know there hasn't been um well we've got a close date in the past so that's not good so again that's a coaching moment we can say to the sales directors i'm noticing these sorts of things and we can drill into the overall account so you know jamie is incredibly dangerous in a in a um a deal review because he can go into exactly forecasting he can see exactly what has happened what we've done what the alerts are what the check-ins are he can see all of the activity over time which if i click on review all events i can see all of the emails that have been sent all the feedback that has come back so all of this is centralized we're wrapping around it with that conversational ai scoring it and then flagging it to the seller the sales manager and the revenue leader so that we can manage our pipeline manage ourselves manage our business and ultimately grow together and hit that number and you know as we go to uh if we dive into coaching so this is not just for jamie to kind of you know look at this stuff and ask smarter questions it's so that we can manage our business better so with charlotte or as a manager you can look to see you know where does she sit what is that what are overall stats what does she have in terms of the stages what insights tailored to her based on other sellers and their historical performance and her performance so you can see that she's got a huge amount of opportunities pushed from last quarter her pipeline's decreasing she um she spends fewer um days on lost deals than other people um and she's closing uh one deals um quicker than other people which is which is a good thing but you can see that her average revenue has decreased so maybe you know she's been farming her patch for a while it's been shrinking it's been drinking it's been shrinking and we need to think you know if she can close we need to develop more pipeline for her maybe that's the conversation that we need to have but you know we can also scroll down and we can see over time what has her win rate been and you can see it kind of does tell that story of it it has been decreasing um and all of this is based so you see this for every single seller every single sales leader so you can compare your sales leaders side by side to see you know who's good who's improving and who needs a lot more health so as you could see from there you know the way that we've run our business we you know our sales forecast our sales forecast process it's based on trustworthy data because it's coming from crm but it's also coming from actual real activity that not that sales reps aren't putting in we know sales reps love telling their managers what they like to hear so that the sales sales managers get off their back with this we're seeing real activity we're layering in ai previous performance so that's checking at every point in the hierarchy is this a sensible call so you've got you know the reps call the ai is cool the managers call all next to each other it's collaborative so you're actually able to go in and change things it's not spreadsheets it's not you know you get a crm report you export it and then all that kind of stuff it's current so it's it's always up to date it's not you know final final or v2 final none of that sort of stuff it's flexible to your business so we've made it tailored to our business so we pull in all the data that we use we've got our categories and you know we are still improving this over time because you know we we're the leaders in this space but also we speak to a huge amount of companies who do things slightly different to us we're continuously learning from them as well and it's a very simple tool you go in you put your forecast number in it gets rolled up your manager can see it and you know we are able to bring in people like financing to plan you know how should we be investing in headcount we're able to bring in marketing leaders into our forecast calls because we trust the data and we trust the process so we can talk about where are our blind spots where do we need more coverage so the outcomes for us and the outcomes could be for you if you were to kind of look into this a bit more seriously is that you can have confidence in your path to number you know where the gaps are you know what's real you know where to help you know what to inspect and how to do it so it's not just you know the kind of bullish aggressive sales leader just jumping around screaming people you can ask really really smart questions and then layer in support so you can support the team in the ways that they need it rather than you know asking this that the same the same 10 questions to every seller and hoping one of them hits the mark you can course correct early so it's not just you know we take a csv file out of our crm and we forecast at the end of the week you can go in all the time and see this stuff moving all the deals moving in real time and as i mentioned you can engage the whole buying team so you can bring in everyone to support you on that journey and with that i want to finish up with this session so it's been a pleasure hopefully you've got a bit of insight into how we exactly use exactly forecasting how jamie asks and answers questions of the data all of that was data but the weight set up is very very similar to the way that we use our own instance of exactly forecasting and what i want to leave you with is that you know people look at this as you know it's a tool to submit my forecast number that's not what it is at all this is a it's a tool and it's a platform to drive behavior change at scale within your organization you know oftentimes you think you know sales aren't doing what they need to do let's hire some more sellers or let's get a new sales leader that's not the case the best way to improve what you're doing to hit your number is it's to manage your business your sellers and your pipeline and to do it at scale in a consistent way and that's exactly what this does it provides you with all the tools to ask and answer the right questions and for for managers to do it themselves and for reps to do themselves so if you're struggling with not forecasting but with growing your business at a consistent pace and doing it across the board across all of your sellers this is the solution for you so thank you very much for your time if you've got any questions we'd be more than happy to answer them and we hope you enjoyed the rest of unleashed thank you very much