Running Your Revenue Operation with Adaptive Forecasting

Editor's note: This is a pre-merger Clari product feature. Some product details may have evolved. Learn more here.

Keeping a pulse on revenue generation isn’t easy. With so many players involved in every deal, forecasting becomes a painful process. Tools are limited, processes are inefficient, and data is rarely up to date. Time is wasted pinning down a number when organizations should be leading with that number. 

Establishing forecasting as the heartbeat of the revenue process requires predictable revenue. And that predictability is driven by visibility and rigor.

Building predictability: Visibility and process

Visibility is knowing what is going on at every level of the business. Building on that visibility, adaptive forecasting capabilities enable organizations to effectively predict revenue results across every revenue type, geography, vertical, product line, and go-to-market channel. Such a platform provides companies with the required tools to understand how they are executing on their strategic growth initiatives in real time for any segment. 

With the flexibility of an adaptive platform, companies can understand what’s going on through limitless lenses including:

• Opportunities and accounts
• Current quarter and future quarters
• New business and renewals
• Subscription and usage-based pricing

But visibility only provides value if it is used to operationalize strategy. Process rigor is created when sales managers can leverage execution insights in board meetings, team meetings, and one-on-ones to make decisions that help them hit their number. This operationalization is key to driving growth and hitting the number quarter after quarter. 

Empowering adaptive forecasting

As the leader in adaptive forecasting, Salesloft's revenue operations platform includes a myriad of capabilities to empower customers to take charge of their forecasts. Revenue teams can inspect every segment of the pipeline and make predictions based on execution history, real-time visibility, and machine learning insights.

Full-Funnel forecasting enables teams to understand the entire revenue process. Knowing what’s going on in net new business and pipeline generation, renewal, churn, cross-sell, and expansions is key to an organization’s success. When all that information is connected, teams can easily access and understand the entire account lifecycle. Detailed KPIs, execution insights, and analytics enable teams to seamlessly transition accounts throughout the revenue journey.

Full-funnel visibility and analtyics

Leaders can see and react to progress in real time with the capability to track and gain insights into strategic growth initiatives, such as expansion of a new region, vertical, or product line. They can also make proactive adjustments to the forecast by running what-if analysis on the forecast with scenario forecasting. They can pull deals in and out, change numbers, and leverage activity data and analytics to inform the forecast. Modeling how different data impacts the forecast brings leaders closer to an accurate forecast, earlier. 

Account planning insights

In addition, accounts are front and center in the adaptive forecasting capabilities that Salesloft announced. Account Planning Insights are crucial to track total revenue potential, annual revenue, penetration, and more account attributes. These metrics can inform how accounts are assigned and managed. A sales rep, account manager, and customer success manager can all engage with an account and understand the entire account lifecycle so they can better ensure prospect and customer satisfaction.

Usage-based forecasting

With this launch, Salesloft is also expanding its capabilities to address additional go-to-market models. Salesloft built forecasting to forecast and track such consumption revenue. The alignment of forecasting and engagement data for these accounts supports sellers as they grapple with the challenge of opening new accounts and expanding usage in those accounts to hit their quota on a quarterly basis.

Take control of your revenue

Across all areas of the platform, Salesloft continues to feature adaptive revenue metrics. These configurable metrics enable teams to track retention rates, forecast coverage ratio, average sales price, and product pipeline mix. Managing the health of the business requires customizability to run any numbers, at any time.

If you’re ready to leverage a platform that adapts to your business, book a demo today.