Sales operations is on the front lines of creating sales forecasts and delivering on their targets. Being successful requires efficiently delivering actionable information to the right people at the right time. Unfortunately, your time is consumed with administrative tasks—extracting data, building spreadsheets, consolidating data entered into spreadsheets, building customized reports—because CRM systems, BI tools, and spreadsheets were not built to be forecasting and pipeline management tools. That means that you are not able to spend more time strategically aiding sales teams and sales leaders to deliver bottom-line results.

Cloud9 solutions not only simplify and streamline the process of forecasting and pipeline management so that you can spend less time on administration, they also enable you to provide your organization with strategic insights that help them to forecast and close more business faster. Using Cloud9 solutions, you can:

• See changes, trends, and patterns in data—without building and maintain spreadsheets
• Provide sales managers and executives with direct visibility into pipeline and forecast—no need to build custom reports or spreadsheets
• Uncover meaningful, actionable insights into forecasts and pipelines—without painstakingly combing through data by writing complex queries and creating additional dashboards

Solving the Visibility Bottleneck

While the data in CRM systems gives sales operations teams visibility into the current state of the sales pipeline, there is a fundamental shortcoming – the lack of actionable data. Sales operations needs continuous visibility into not just the current state of the pipeline, but also what’s changed in the pipeline for better or worse, and the ability to get that information into the right hands quickly. To get that information, your only option had been to spend your time extracting and manipulating data in spreadsheets—an inefficient and incomplete solution at best.

Cloud9 solutions track changes in your sales pipeline and make that information available to you and your sales managers—no spreadsheets required. With that visibility, sales managers can easily identify where there is risk in their forecast and pipeline so that they know where to focus their time in order to ensure that their teams can close the deals they need in order to meet their quota and forecast.

Meaningful Insight into the Pipeline and Forecast

Much of sales operations’ time is spent building custom reports, dashboards, and spreadsheets—and yet sales managers and sales teams still don’t have information that makes it clear what action to take. The reports and dashboards are not the problem—the problem is that the data available in CRM systems is only part of what sales managers and leaders need to be able to make the right decisions.

To deliver information that sales teams and leaders can act on to deliver results, you need meaningful analysis of the pipeline, not just another report showing the current state. Cloud9 forecasting and pipeline management solutions go beyond just streamlining the administration of forecasting and reporting, they analyze your data to provide meaningful and actionable insight into the forecast and pipeline. Bring together your data—including CRM, ERP, quota, and compensation data, Cloud9 can analyze data to find patterns and trends that can accurately identify where the risk lies in your forecast and what you can do to address that risk. With Cloud9 you can:

• See what’s changed week-over-week, month-over-month and quarter-over-quarter
• Identify opportunities and risks in the sales pipeline
• Analyze historical data compared to the current pipeline to identify ways to hit quotas and forecasts
• Make actionable, up-to-date information directly available to sales managers and leaders

Cloud9 solutions make your data work for you rather than making you work to get meaningful information from it. Instead of spending valuable time on non-scalable processes and requests for another custom CRM dashboard or another custom CRM report, you can give sales leaders the actionable information they need when they need it.