The Cloud9 Intelligent Forecasting Suite is a solution for forecasting and pipeline management that provides sales managers with early warning of risks and opportunities while taking the pain out of the forecasting process. Using Cloud9 helps sales managers get actionable visibility into their forecast and pipeline, increase forecast accuracy, and maximize revenue.

 

Bringing Intelligence to Sales Forecasting The release of the Cloud9 Intelligent Forecasting Suite gives you actionable information to help you manage your forecast and pipeline. Learn more about Cloud9’s new release and what analysts and customers have to say about it.

The Forecasting Crisis

Sales forecasting is no longer just an administrative process for submitting a best-guess number. Providing a reliable forecast and delivering on that forecast have become critical to helping your company maximize revenue and profit. Missing, or even exceeding, your forecast can have severe consequences for your supply chain, your profits, and the confidence in your sales organization.

But less than half of forecasted opportunities are actually won. The problem is not lack of data, the problem is that your sales managers are woefully underequipped to manage and deliver on their forecasts. Your sales managers are forced to manually cobble together spreadsheets and CRM systems to create their forecasts and get the information they need to win business.

However, spreadsheets and CRM systems are not forecasting solutions-they leave critical blind spots that hide risk and opportunity until it is too late, and they leave you with a burdensome process that wastes resources and introduces errors.

The Cloud9 Solution

The Cloud9 Intelligent Forecasting Suite is the first solution that not only addresses the forecasting process but also provides an early warning system that gives your sales managers the visibility and guidance they need to maximize revenue and profit.

Cloud9 does this by combining forecasting administration with predictive intelligence in an application for sales managers. This allows you to spend less time and effort creating the forecast and trying to find the information you need. Instead, you can spend your time taking action to address risks and take advantage of opportunities. The result: better visibility, increased forecast accuracy, and more revenue.

Provide Actionable Visibility

Cloud9 gives your sales organization full visibility into the forecast and pipeline. Using patent-pending technology to track the full history of changes in your data, Cloud9 brings together your Salesforce CRM data with other data such as forecast data, bookings data from your ERP system, and quota information from spreadsheets. That provides you visibility into the changes, patterns, and trends that you need to understand and manage your forecast and pipeline. It shows you this information in the ways that fit your organization—by role hierarchy, product line, overlay team, revenue schedule, or any other view you need. Sales managers use Pipeline Accelerator, a component of the Cloud9 Intelligent Forecasting Suite, to see these changes and patterns, giving them information that helps them decide where to focus and take action to win more revenue.

Cloud9 also gives your sales managers the up-to-date visibility they need to manage the forecast process. Managers can track progress in creating the forecast as well as the full history of forecast judgments entered by their teams. With this visibility, they can ensure that the forecast is meaningful and complete.

Identify and Manage Risk

The Cloud9 Intelligent Forecasting Suite uncovers the risk hidden in your forecast and pipeline, alerting you in time to take action to manage that risk before it ruins your forecast. It does that by helping you analyze your data to find historical patterns of success and failure, and then comparing your current forecast and pipeline to those patterns on an ongoing basis.

With that up-to-date risk assessment, Cloud9 shows you where to focus and what to do. Is a forecast too optimistic based on analysis of the opportunities in it? Your sales managers can enter their judgment and work with the sales team to make the forecast more accurate. Are opportunities at greater risk if they move through parts of the sales process without certain types of activity? Cloud9 finds those risky deals so that you can focus on taking action to get them back on track, or stop wasting resources on them if they are simply highly unlikely to close. Rather than being forced to rely solely on gut feeling, you can manage your forecast and pipeline using analysis of your data.

Dramatically Improve the Forecasting Process

The Cloud9 Intelligent Forecasting Suite helps you manage your complete forecasting process, eliminating the administrative overhead, errors, and inconsistency created by relying on spreadsheets, CRM systems, and other manual approaches for forecasting. Cloud9 provides a single place where your sales reps and sales managers can enter their forecasts, sales managers can add their judgments and overrides on forecasts, and sales operations can lock the forecast for whatever forecast period your organization uses. It makes the forecasting process and results visible to the sales organization, giving managers up-to-date visibility to the information that they need about their teams’ forecasts, and provides meaningful analysis to make forecasts meaningful and accurate, not just a best guess.

To learn more about the Cloud9 Intelligent Forecasting Suite, read the datasheet, view a product demo, or contact Cloud9.