...It’s Time for an Upgrade That Works for Everyone
In order to hit your sales numbers, presales data intelligence is key to profitability. Here’s why it’s important to stay ahead of the game in sales forecasting
In today’s hyper-competitive world of sales, one of the key differences between a profitable sale and a loss comes down to one simple factor—sales forecasting intelligence. The more visibility your sales leaders and C-level execs have surrounding potential deals, the current health of POC’s, and the overall sales pipeline can enormously effect the entire enterprise from top to bottom.
If you’re a CRO, SE Leader or CFO, you already know accurate sales forecasting will make or break your quarter and/or year. But the problem has always been and still remains, how do you gain access to a more robust data set that tells the whole story? How do you create a system that gives you an unfair advantage over the competition? How do you increase profitability and eradicate losses—each and every quarter?
If you’re in sales, there’s a 99.9% chance you have a CRM like Salesforce to manage deals and keep organized. But simply inputting information and “going with your gut” does absolutely nothing to move the needle when it comes to forecasting and hitting numbers. In short, Salesforce can’t do the forecasting for you. So, many leading companies have chosen to utilize the latest presales forecasting solutions that integrate with their CRM to help get ahead and gain an edge. But even forecasting solutions like Xactly and Clari still can’t tell you the whole story without the latest presales data and that means missing forecasts more frequently.
In order to optimize the functionality of revenue forecasting software, you need a solution that adds the missing elements—the hard data—in order to gain the knowledge you’re looking for. You need a solution that deftly gathers all information across all teams, drops it all in one place, and intelligently determines what deals are in danger and what actions need to be taken so executives and sales engineers can make important decisions instantly, instead of weeks later.
After all, instant data intelligence allowing for immediate action can increase profitability and decrease loss exponentially.
If you’re a business looking for answers to the hardest questions like:
- Is my sales team going to hit our numbers this quarter?
- What opportunities in evaluation are delayed or unhealthy?
- Is post-sales struggling with deployments. Are my customers unhappy?
- What features do our customers want? How do we prioritize?
…then it’s time to jump into 2023, ditch the spreadsheets, and find a sales forecasting solution that enhances your current sales operations and ensures you win all the time…right?
Here’s the top three reasons why your CRM, sales teams, and forecasting solutions need an upgrade in order to stay on top.
1. The Data You Need for Success Isn’t Available
Right now, all the information you need to make the right choices regarding sales is locked away in the mind of a sales engineer or sales leader. Without transparency and complete visibility, it’s impossible to make decisions in real time that will positively affect your business. In fact, most of the time, when the most “current” data arrives, it’s already too late to save a deal, regroup, or refocus on other accounts/business. Knowing what lies ahead of you is key when differentiating yourself in the marketplace—what you don’t know is hurting you.
But what’s the solution? Augment your current systems to generate presales forecasting intelligence that rapidly decreases cycle times through real time visibility and precision signaling on a platform that does the work for you.
2. It’s Hard to Justify Your Teams or Build a World-Class Team
The job of an SE is to win. Without a solid/increasing technical win rate, your job as an SE becomes significantly stressful, and that stress is passed to your team. When sales numbers are low and when multiple quarters underperform, it’s extremely difficult to justify your sales team as well as your approach. By discovering problems before they start and identifying trends before they’re apparent, you and your team can realistically predict sales numbers and go after the deals that are winnable—and that means an increased win rate.
The ability to “see the future” of your sales teams’ production through precision sales forecasting is not only great for the company overall, but empowers sales engineers and leaders to alleviate stress on their teams while consistently generating successful quarters. In other words, if you take the guessing game out of sales forecasting, all you’re left with is winning—and that’s what world-class teams do.
3. You’re Spending Too Much Time Inputting Meaningless Data
It’s Friday. Your numbers and analysis for the quarter are due. You’re inputting data into the CRM and no one will make heads or tails of it until sometime next week…next month? And by the time that sense is made, the opportunity to save deals, recalibrate, and react to problems is long gone.
If you’ve ever led a sales team, you’ve most certainly had moments where you’ve thrown your hands up in the air and said, “There’s nothing else I could have done.”
Again, spreadsheets, CRM’s, and sales forecasting solutions all have a major common flaw—they can’t digest and compute data in a meaningful way that answers all the questions and identifies all the signals associated with determining healthy POC’s and successfully forecasting quarterly numbers.
Up until now, that kind of data analysis fell on the shoulders of an SE or sales leader—and oftentimes those evaluations were largely left to best guesses.
In today’s world, the data is meaningless unless you can act upon it instantly with positive results. Knowing that a deal failed after the fact because of certain errors does nothing to expand profitability in the moment—instead, it’s simply a learning experience. And while learning experiences are valuable for the maturation of your team, they don’t help your bottom line right now.
But imagine if you could experience a paradigm shift in your sales operations—instead of learning from your mistakes, you just don’t make them anymore. Instead of learning curves, success. These types of conversations can only make sense if there is more robust presales forecasting intelligence that integrates with sales forecasting solutions to deliver a bigger picture, one that requires zero guessing, and makes corrective action and proactivity simple.
Precision Forecasting Is Here
To sum it up, a solution like Provarity isn’t designed to compete against sales forecasting solutions—it’s designed to make them more effective. It’s designed to give you exactly what you thought you were getting—a crystal ball of sales intelligence.
The knowledge you need to streamline sales operations and gain an upper hand is now not only possible, but also required to maintain or regain success.
As Jack Canfield, coauthor of the Chicken Soup for the Soul series once said, “If you aren’t moving closer to what you want in sales (or in life), you probably aren’t doing enough asking.” Provarity not only asks the questions you aren’t asking, but also answers them for you. And that means more profitability and a well-balanced sales force that’s cranking out win after win.
