Predicting sales is an integral aspect of any business’s health.
This is even more true when you have multiple sales teams around the globe, all trying to predict what’s in their sales pipelines.
Enter in, this week’s guest on the Sales Engagement Podcast, Monica O’Kelly. Monica is the Senior Director of Revenue Operations at TripleLift, a company that helps advertisers with native advertising campaigns.
When Monica joined the team in 2017 in a sales planning role, one of the first things she wanted to address was managing global sales pipelines. She formed a revenue functions team in 2017 and has been overseeing that for the past two-and-a-half years.
Their team did two key things to facilitate change.
First, they started integrating Salesforce as a key component in managing their pipeline.
Then, they created a nuanced approach that helped her to create a better system for predicting business.
Their approach involved sellers reporting their predicted sales volumes for every quarter based on a three-tiered system called commit-probable-upside.
Commit -A conservative estimate of sales. This is guaranteed to the business.
Probable-This is the seller’s estimate as to how much he or she can sell.
Upside: This is a blue sky projection, based on every deal closing.
As a result of Monica and her team’s hard work, sellers have reported that they are doing a better job of accurately depicting their numbers by using this formula for a realistic approach to forecasting, and the business is growing as a result.