“Cloud9 provided us with the visibility our sales managers need to effectively coach their teams, manage their pipeline more efficiently and provide senior management with more predictable sales forecasts.”

Director of Sales Operations,
Kaseya

Sales managers have two crucial responsibilities – their executives need them to reliably forecast and deliver bookings and revenue while their sales teams need their guidance and support to win deals and make their quotas. Even the best sales managers find those responsibilities challenging because they lack the tools and information that they need to create meaningful forecasts and actively manage their team to deliver their revenue commitments.

Cloud9 solutions help sales managers get the most out of their teams by giving them the tools and information they need to understand and manage forecast and pipeline. With Cloud9 solutions, sales managers can:

• Increase team performance by using visibility into pipeline and changes to identify where to focus sales teams and what to do to close their opportunities successfully.
• Increase win rates by identifying risks in the pipeline in time to coach and assist teams in turning those opportunities into wins.
• Increase forecast accuracy by helping them ensure that their teams successfully close the opportunities they forecast.

Actionable Insights into the Forecast and Pipeline

For sales managers, the problem is not a lack of data – it’s that there is too much data but not enough meaningful information. Another report or another dashboard that doesn’t provide information that you can immediately use isn’t the answer.

Cloud9 solutions uncover the meaningful information in your data that you need to provide a reliable forecast to your leadership and to manage your teams so that they consistently deliver on that forecast. Cloud9 makes it easy to get the information that you need and gets that information to you in time to put it to use. Cloud9 tracks and analyzes changes, trends, and patterns in your forecast and pipeline to show you insights such as:

• Current pipeline and forecast metrics such as quota attainment, open pipeline, and current outlook
• Which opportunities are at risk-- for example, opportunities that have been pushed out, adjusted, or stalled
• Trends and patterns that help predict how likely an opportunity is to close

By providing actionable information about pipeline and forecast, Cloud9 transforms the role of the sales manager from an observer to an engaged manager driving continuing performance improvement. Cloud9 adds analytic insight to sales managers intuition to help them better identify specific areas that need improvement and take action to address them, rather than spend time trying to simply make sense of CRM reports and dashboards.

Coaching that Drives Performance

It isn’t possible for sales managers to be involved in every opportunity that their teams are pursuing. To be successful, sales managers need to coach their teams effectively. But without actionable insight into forecast and pipeline, managers can’t be effective coaches.

Cloud9 solutions provide sales managers with a view into their team’s performance, forecast, and pipeline that gives them the information they need to be effective coaches. With Cloud9, sales managers can:

• Know instantly “what’s changed” in the forecast and pipeline via easy-to-use dashboards, email updates, and mobile alerts so that they can focus on coaching sessions on coaching rather than on reporting status
• Understand which opportunities are most at risk and need to be the focus of coaching
• Help sales teams prioritize the best opportunities and avoid wasting time on poor opportunities

This increased visibility allows sales managers to conduct high-value, one-on-one coaching sessions, turning weekly sales meetings from dry recitals of spreadsheet data into deal-closing strategy discussions.