What Do Sales Executives at Google, LinkedIn, Pandora and Yahoo! Have in Common?

3 Sales Best Practices • 2

Introduction ............................................................................................................1

What Pandora, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Google All Have in Common to Help Manage Revenue Performance ....................................................................2

Operationalizing Forecasting Best Practices ........................................................4

3 Best Practices for Driving Revenue Performance ..............................................5

Summary ...............................................................................................................8

Table of Contents

3 Sales Best Practices • 3

The S&P has risen by 18% in the last 12 months, but companies like Yahoo, LinkedIn, Pandora and Google have far outperformed the S&P’s growth rate. The question is, why? Clearly they share some advantages, including visionary, strategic CEOs and a relentless commitment to product innovation. But these high-valuation companies also share something else – they all use a formalized forecasting process and Big Data technology from C9 to grow revenue.

You may think your business is different than these companies so you can’t replicate their success – but is it really? What company wouldn’t benefit from understanding and operationalizing the best practices of double- or triple-digit revenue growth?

Introduction

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Yahoo

Yahoo is another C9 customer whose share price is at its highest level since early 2008. In fact, they doubled in value since Marissa Mayer joined last year (see Figure 2).

Pandora

Let’s start by taking a closer look at Pandora, a C9 customer. As illustrated in Figure 1, this fast-growing public company’s valuation has increased two and a half times in the past 12 months to $4.2 billion. By using C9 to drive revenue performance, Pandora increased its close rate from 30% to 42% in the first six months and reduced its lead-to-deal close conversion time from 150 days to 120 days. When you’re a public company, having predictable revenue and outperforming Wall Street expectations are keys to your company’s valuation.

Watch this video and hear first hand from Steven Turacek, Director of Business Operations at Pandora.

What Pandora, Yahoo, LinkedIn, and Google All Have in Common to Help Manage Revenue Performance

Figure 1: Pandora’s positive share value performance

Figure 2: Yahoo’s positive share value performance

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LinkedIn

Another Wall Street darling, LinkedIn, manages a whopping 100% of its $1.5B in revenue with C9. With close to a quarter billion members worldwide, the company aims to be not just a social graph for professionals, but also the “world’s first economic graph.” In simple terms, this means that LinkedIn will make every job in the world available on its website.

Yahoo is experiencing quite a turn-around – and it’s garnering industry and investor approval along the way. Sure, it’s rebranding its logo and making high-profile acquisitions of companies like Tumblr. But what may not be as apparent is Yahoo’s laser focus on becoming a “revenue focused” company – and how C9 is helping it’s sales team accomplish this lofty goal.

Before C9 was first rolled out at Yahoo, the company’s sales reps typically used multiple Excel sheets and dashboards to figure out their weekly forecasts—burning through time that would have been spent driving sales. But after implementing C9 and creating a formalized forecasting process, Yahoo improved its forecast accuracy to 98%, reduced the time each sales rep spends each week generating a forecast by two hours, and cut the time management spends on forecasting by four hours a week. This has added five additional sales FTE capacity on the selling side and one FTE on the management side.

With 75% of its revenue managed by C9, Yahoo has plans to expand C9 to its sales teams in Europe and Asia. Yahoo’s Senior Director of Sales Strategy and Operations, Patrick O’Leary, in this video talks more about how C9 has helped Yahoo drive revenue performance.

Figure 3: LinkedIn’s positive share value performance

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As shared previously, C9 works with some of the fastest growing companies leveraging our best practices and technologies to monitor and maximize their company’s revenue. These thought leaders in sales strategy and operations provide the right tools and processes to their sales team to improve their productivity. As a result, their sales teams are free to focus more on selling – and less on inputting data into CRM applications.

Let’s take a closer look at three best practices that are helping these companies drive revenue performance.

#1: Add Process and Science to the Art of ForecastingFor most companies, forecasting is still based on hunches (as opposed to it being a data-driven exercise). So results depend solely on the gut feeling of a sales rep and what he or she thinks are the chances of a deal closing – hardly a scientific or accurate method.

Accurate forecasting requires the right mix of process and science. This means you need:

●● The right process in place to ensure that all forecasted deals are updated weekly on a certain day of the week

●● Data science to identify trends based on historical data – which will ultimately predict how deals are going to behave. (For example, the aggregate pipeline analysis of hundreds of C9 customers indicates that if the dollar value of a deal hasn’t changed in 90 days, the chances of that deal closing is very low, if not zero. But if the dollar value of a deal has gone down, the close rate will increase to 77%.)

CSO Insights is a research and consulting firm focused on best practices in sales and marketing. In its “2013 Sales Management Optimization Study”, which surveyed over 1,700 companies, CSO discovered that only 46% of forecast deals end up being won. To put that into perspective, the odds of winning at a craps table in Vegas is over 49%. When your odds of winning at the tables is higher than winning with your forecast, it’s time for a board-level discussion about running sales based on metrics—not hunches.

Companies that implement the right mix of best practices and technology for managing sales and revenue will ultimately achieve far better revenue results. And C9 can help. For example, Stanley Black & Decker used C9 to increase its close rate from an already impressive 59% to 76%.” Watch this video to learn more.

As all of the previous examples suggest, having a keen focus on Revenue Performance is the lifeblood of success for any high-performing company. When you have both a formalized forecasting process and a way to leverage Big Data and predictive analytics, you can operationalize best practices that keep your finger on the pulse on your company’s revenue – and ultimately help your business thrive.

Operationalizing Forecasting Best Practices

3 Best Practices for Driving Revenue Performance

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C9’s Active Forecast application supports this best practice. It has been built to handle corner cases such as support for foreign currencies, non-standard fiscal calendars, quota splits and product, geographic and role-based forecast series. It’s also extremely easy to use. Forecasts can be submitted in as few as three clicks, and users can review, edit and submit forecasting judgment in one place. Additionally, C9 embeds its applications such as pipeline assessment and forecast submission to ensure that your entire sales force works in a consistent, coordinated fashion and delivers the most accurate forecasts possible.

#2: Proactively Notify Sales of Deals That Need AttentionUsing benchmarks determined through analysis of $1.8 trillion in sales pipeline and over 7 million opportunities, C9 has identified the top issues (or factors) that introduce risk into sales pipelines. Based on these factors, C9 applies a risk score to each opportunity and highlights the source of each risk. These metrics are embedded throughout the application and can be used to adjust forecasts and develop mitigation strategies that lead to higher opportunity close rates.

Figure 4 illustrates C9 Active Insights Highlighting At-Risk Deals

C9’s approach to big data analysis results in over 80% accuracy when identifying deals that are at risk. First, C9 captures and timestamps every fine-grained data field that’s related to an opportunity in a company’s CRM system. It then measures and captures changes to these data points several times a day. Consequently, C9 can display actual (not approximated) information from any point in time or across any time period. This allows users to understand exactly how their business is trending and results in a very reliable set of forward-looking projections.

For example, C9 will flag the at-risk sales opportunities that sales managers have the highest likelihood of saving if they take the right steps. For example, they can focus their one-on-one pipeline discussions with each sales rep on those deals that need attention. C9 delivers these insights and recommended actions proactively to users’ preferred devices.

#3: Understand What Deals Have Pushed and WhyC9 analyzes a company’s entire CRM dataset – not just bits and pieces of it – and not only identifies changes in sales stage and the amount by which any opportunity has increased or decreased, but also identifies the sources of any changes.

Figure 4: C9 Active Insights

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Waterfall charts (see Figure 5) help users visualize the root causes of changes. This visual analysis allows sales reps and managers to quickly zero in on core issues and formulate plans to address them. For example, C9’s waterfall charts clearly show deals with close dates that have changed multiple times and highlights reps who are inflating their pipeline with deals that will likely never close. C9 software also provides another chart that highlights “Blue Bird” deals – new deals that were won significantly faster than the company’s average sales cycle. Understanding these types of deals can help sales managers partner better with marketing to accelerate their lead-acquisition-to-deal-closure rate.

1 Pushed deals – Deals whose close date has been delayed

So follow in the footsteps of some of the fastest-growing companies today. Whether you’re part of a global Fortune 500 or working for an up-and-coming start-up, you really can’t afford to gamble with your revenue performance. By implementing a formalized process for managing pipeline risk and sales forecasting, and leveraging Big Data technology from companies like C9, you can focus on increasing revenue predictability and managing revenue risk — and ultimately drive true revenue growth.

Figure 5: C9 Waterfall Chart Highlights Changes in Pipeline

Summary

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