Traditional CRM systems go a long way toward helping companies keep track of their sales activities and customer contacts, and they provide some reporting to help sales executives manage their functions. But sales teams need clear visibility into their pipeline — past, present and future — to help prioritize which deals to focus on in order to maximize revenue. This is where today’s CRM solutions fall short.

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Forecasting and pipeline management don’t get nearly the attention they deserve and that doesn’t make sense. Of all the parts of CRM, the forecast is one of the few things many companies still leave to manual systems, i.e. spreadsheets. Even sales compensation has a higher place in heaven as companies like Xactly have blazed a trail away from spreadsheets to a system with a database and analytics, with excellent results. You’d think that sales people would be willing to invest as much in the forecast as they do in counting their commissions.

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If you want to hit the booking and revenue targets required to operate a business, you have to manage your sales forecast and pipeline. Optimally you should be able to monitor and act upon them any day of the week and make adjustments whenever you need to. Unfortunately, most organizations have to wait until they finish their manual efforts at the end of the month or quarter, or they miss critical changes in deals and behavior because they rely only on reporting from their sales force automation (SFA) software.

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Jim Burleigh is the CEO of Cloud9 and a veteran of SaaS businesses having served as a senior executive at Navis, and salesforce.com. In addition, he served as the CEO of SmartTurn, the leading SaaS warehouse and inventory management solution, immediately prior to joining Cloud9. His background includes sales, marketing, and technical expertise developed as the sixth employee at salesforce.com. He has a B.S. in engineering and applied science from the California Institute of Technology.

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Cloud9 Tuesday announced a new tool for sales forecasting to give users insight into their sales activity and manage sales performance. The update will be part of the Cloud 9 Sales Performance Suite.

“What we’re announcing is a full-blown forecasting application,” says Jim Burleigh, CEO of Cloud9. “The key change there is adding in the ability to enter in aggregate and individual deal-level overrides. That’s all wrapped in a process application that incorporates a lot of customizable functionality that allows people to forecast, see their forecast, and analyze their forecast in the way that’s best for their organization. Everybody forecasts in a little bit different way and has their own secret sauce in there.”

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Today, Cloud9 Analytics announced a new solution for intelligent sales forecasting. The key word is “intelligent.” It’s a good descriptor if you want to get a point across. Sales forecasts are the very best guess about which deals will come in - and when – based on the best intelligence on that day.

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It used to be that forecasting was reserved for weather and stocks, but thanks to Cloud9’s new Sales Performance Suite, which features a new forecasting solution, users have the ability to actively managing their sales performance in an effort to accurately forecast sales.

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The intersection of technology and sales – it’s critical to anyone involved in optimizing a sales organization’s output. We devote countless hours exploring the challenges our customers face, finding the right solutions and, finally, mitigating critical business obstacles by selling the right technology. Yet, many companies have failed to identify, examine and rectify a pandemic business issue – an inefficient sales organization driven by insufficient technology.

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The Silicon Valley/San Jose Business Journal is reporting that Cloud9, a provider of sales forecasting and pipeline management solutions for Salesforce CRM, has named Tracy Eiler as its new chief marketing officer.

Eiler, who will report to Chief Executive Officer Jim Burleigh, has more than 25 years of enterprise software marketing experience in sales-driven companies.

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These days, companies are applying the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model to just about everything, from core business functions, including IT, to industry-specific processes. This list, compiled with the help of SaaS trend watchers and users, provides a representative look at what types of software you’ll find offered in the cloud.

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