We deployed Cloud9 to our sales organization to get actionable visibility into our sales pipeline. That visibility has already improved accountability, leading to more wins. Rolling out Cloud9’s new forecasting capabilities to our sales managers will help us efficiently manage risk.
Most sales pipelines are black boxes. Leads go in. Some deals come out. Everything in between is a mystery.
Many sales managers know their total pipeline has grown or contracted from one period to the next, but few can answer specific questions about what’s changed, and everyone needs those answers. To make matters worse, managers need answers to the same questions by region, product, rep or any other dimension their business can dream up.
CRM systems are simply not equipped to answer these pipeline management questions since they track only the present but provide little or no insight or analytics. This leaves sales organizations no choice but to create countless spreadsheets aimed at identifying the growth, change and risk in their pipeline. The result? A hodgepodge of manually-created assessments that is ineffective, error-prone and very costly to maintain.
Pipelines change as deals enter, progress through, and leave the pipeline. The important answers to know about the deals in your pipeline are related to the rate of change and exceptions, such as:
Managing your pipeline is fundamentally about understanding what’s changed in your deal flow. Cloud9 combines its historical sales data warehouse with sales reports, dashboards and analytics to enable you to explore any portion of your sales pipeline. Not only can you see current status, but you can also compare any two points in time to see what has changed at a top-line summary level all the way down to individual deal details.
No CRM or add-on product gives you more ways to analyze pipeline data than Cloud9. And, once you experience the visibility that Cloud9 delivers, you’ll wonder how you ever managed your pipeline without it.
