In sales, there’s no such thing as secret formulas. Closing deals is hard, persistent work. But top performing sales leaders, like Dave Fitzgerald, EVP at Brainshark, has one thing you don’t have: knowledge. When he and his team at Brainshark, the leading provider of on-demand presentation technology, implemented Cloud9 Pipeline Accelerator as part of their SaaS-based customer-facing technology architecture, they turned that knowledge into an additional $1.6M in revenue that they hadn’t planned on.
You see, Dave was frustrated with multiple teams working on multiple opportunity types and were spending an inordinate amount of time to figure out who should be working on what deals at what time in the quarter to bring home the bacon. And even then they weren’t always sure.
Enter Cloud9. By providing visibility into what was changing in their pipeline month-to-month, week-to-week, even day-to-day, the Brainshark sales team was able to increase forecasted win rates 5% simply by having the knowledge to work on deals that mattered most or were most likely to close in the forecast period. At an $8M quarterly run-rate, that translates into $1.6M annually. And, even Dave will tell you those numbers are conservative.
Call it what you want: knowledge, visibility, an extra edge: the results speak for themselves. Instead of just barely making their numbers, they’re blowing them out of the water.
At Covad Communications, a leading broadband provider, Cloud9 returned 960 hours of selling and team-coaching time to their sales leadership they used to spend on sales reporting. What would you do with that “found” time? More time with customers? Outsmart the competition? Focus on deals at risk? Also, InContact, a leading on-demand contact center technology firm, has increased forecast accuracy 60% using Cloud9 and you can’t have accurate forecasts if you’re not closing deals on time and as promised.
Sure, you work as hard as these three top-flight sales organizations. But it’s what you don’t know about what’s changing in your pipeline that makes those end-of-quarter conversations so difficult.
