“Cloud9 provides visibility into pipeline dynamics that we never thought we could get very easily, and the result is better predictability, not only for sales, but for the entire business. Being data driven helps us make more insightful decisions about how best to move the business forward.”

Michael DiFilippo,
Chief Financial Officer,
MuleSoft

Pressures on sales executives have never been higher. Even in the face of a challenging economic environment, they still need to deliver their revenue and profit goals to the company’s bottom line. That means ensuring that your team can deliver on the forecast—not only does the rest of the company rely on having an accurate forecast for planning, but your ability to deliver on your forecast is a reflection of how well you understand your business and how effectively you manage your sales organization. However, forecasting has typically been an administrative task with dubious accuracy, resulting in a forecast full of risk.

Cloud9 solutions turn forecasting into a strategic activity that helps drive sales performance by simplifying and extending sales forecasting and pipeline management. Cloud9 solutions bring predictive insight and actionable visibility to forecasting and pipeline management, making them much more than just an administrative task. This insight gives sales executives the answers to questions that keep them up at night:

• Are we going to make our number this quarter?
• Where is there risk in our forecast and pipeline?
• What can we do to increase sales performance?

Uncovering Risk

Forecasts that are little more than an administrative task have risks hidden within them that are invisible to sales executives and to their CRM systems. Without insight into those risks in time to take action to address them, the forecast is not much more than a slightly educated guess—hardly something that the rest of the organization can plan around and count on you to deliver.

Cloud9 turns forecasting from an administrative effort into a strategic process of assessing and managing risk in order to deliver on revenue commitments. Cloud9 solutions identify risks in the forecast and pipeline while there is still time to address those risks. That insight gives sales leaders and sales managers the information they need to take action to keep opportunities on track, and it provides sales executives continuous visibility into the real health of the sales pipeline—not just when an opportunity is lost or at the end of the quarter.

Data-Driven Management

Sales organizations traditionally have “made do” with tools that were not designed for forecasting and pipeline management, and in particular not designed to provide the actionable insights required to be effective. Although CRM systems record and report data about the current state of the pipeline, they lack the ability to analyze that data to turn it into actionable information. Spreadsheets introduce further complexity, inconsistency, and overhead.

Cloud9 uses analysis of your current and historical data to guide your sales organization to maximize performance. It analyzes data from your CRM and other systems to uncover best practices and critical success factors and then applies those insights to your current pipeline and forecast, guiding sales teams to leverage best practices and get the most out of their pipeline. The result:

• More accurate forecasts: deep understanding of historical performance and success factors help organizations to make more realistic forecasts and more reliably deliver on those forecasts
• Maximizing the value in the pipeline: implementing best practices increases win rates and accelerates revenue
• Active management of sales performance: teams can use information about conversion rates, comparisons to historical performance, and performance of individual sales reps to coach and manage sales teams more effectively